Engender blog

5 things you should know about the Fairer Scotland Action Plan

The long-awaited Scottish Government Fairer Scotland Action Plan was launched yesterday, following extensive engagement with the public in 2015. It commits to fulfil 50 ‘Fairness Actions’ by the end of this parliament, across 5 thematic ‘ambitions’. Here are 5 points of our own.

1. 50 actions

There are 50 actions in the 100 page document. Some of them are clear-cut and targeted towards a particular outcome, like the Domestic Abuse Bill (#25) and the Scottish Baby Box (#27). Along with many others, these have been announced previously, with much of the document repackaging a slate of commitments from the SNP manifesto for Holyrood 2016. In this sense, given the time that has elapsed since the initial exercise, much of Fairer Scotland simply (and helpfully) draws together Scottish Government policy related to social justice in one place.

Everything you need to know about the gender commitments in the Holyrood 2016 manifestos

With Scotland going to the polls on Thursday, it is an exciting week for the political nerds amongst us. At Engender HQ we will be eagerly number crunching the proportion of women returned as MSPs and mapping the outcome in terms of pre-election commitments to women’s equality.

Of course, now that all political parties have released their manifestos, we already know what is on the table. Last week we published this detailed gender summary of promises from the main political parties, in relation to our own Gender Matters manifesto and other directly relevant issues for women.

On the whole we are pleased to see a range of gender equality issues addressed by the majority of parties. Unsurprisingly, some of our calls remain missing, especially where these are radical or structural in nature, but there are a number of notable highlights.

Gender Equality Bill

We called for a Gender Equality Bill to drive gender issues up the political agenda and create accountability in areas where the pace of change has been incredibly slow. Scottish Labour, the Scottish Greens and the Women’s Equality Party have all committed to publishing such a Bill over the course of the next parliament, with RISE including an Anti-Sexism Bill as one of its big ticket policy items.

Quotas

With relevant powers reserved to Westminster, political parties themselves are currently ‘gatekeepers’ to equal representation in Scottish politics. It’s therefore very heartening that the SNP, Labour and Greens have used their manifestos to formally back the Women 50:50 campaign. The campaign (and Engender’s manifesto) calls for measures to ensure that women are 50% of candidates in national and local elections, and 50% of public board members. Power to set gender quotas for public boards is coming to Holyrood, and both the SNP and Greens have committed to legislation that would set these at 50%.

Women lose in Summer Budget 2015

Wednesday’s budget made for extremely grim listening and reading. Low-income women and their children will be pushed into poverty at the expense of increased spending on defence and tax breaks for the affluent. Women were always going to be penalised by this budget, not least because of the well-trailed £12 billion worth of cuts to the ‘welfare’ budget, but some of the detail and framing language is even worse than predicted.

Our recent report sets out why gender inequality has risen as the result of welfare reform. Women’s caring roles and low-paid jobs mean that different groups of women are particularly impacted by austerity measures. Summer Budget 2015 is no different. The House of Commons Library has already issued analysis estimating that 70% of the £34bn pounds of savings to be made by 2020/21 will come from women’s pockets. As HMT has not published an Equality Statement alongside its budget, outlining how different groups will be affected by its spending choices, we can only assume that it does not care that this will undermine gender equality, and increase women’s and children’s poverty.

Women and the draft Scottish budget 2015-16

One of the things that Engender does that we're nerdily excited by, is to provide support to the Scottish Women's Budget Group. Some of our staff and members are long-time members of the budget group, and it's always a pleasure to get together with them to talk about Scotland's budget.

The draft Scottish budget for 2015-16 was published on October 9th, and the SWBG convened an open meeting to discuss it that took place on Tuesday. Participants heard from Leaza McSorley on Scotland's economy, Emily Thomson on feminist economics, and Angela O'Hagan on gender budgeting, before digging in to the budget itself.