7Equality impact assessment of the Budget
112.The Committee asked the Chancellor whether HM Treasury carried out an equality impact analysis of the Autumn Budget. The Chancellor stated that:
The equalities impact requirements apply to all measures across government, not just the Budget. We do that for all measures. Ministers receive advice on the equalities impacts of every measure before they sign them off, and are asked to sign the advice to confirm that they have received and considered it.103
113.Clare Lombardelli, Director of Strategy, Planning and Budget, HM Treasury, told the Committee that a formal Equalities Impact Assessment was not published because, while the impacts of policies were considered, calculating accurate and reliable information was difficult:
We do not publish any of the detail of the internal policy advice that goes to Ministers, but we do consider the equalities impact of all the measures. We have considered it in the process. Ministers see that advice. […] It is very difficult to produce an overall robust picture by different demographic groups. All sorts of things affect that: the household structure, taxes and benefits, all those things. Other people produce versions and variants of this, but they all have their own faults and issues.104
114.The Chancellor stated that data may not be available to conduct such analyses: “If the data is available, that is one thing. If the data is not available, of course it cannot readily be done”.105 When asked whether he had asked the Office for National Statistics to look into this, he said he had not.106
115.Paul Johnson told the Committee that producing impact assessments on the basis of gender would be possible because the data was available, but that the conclusions drawn from it may be less clear:
You clearly can provide some analysis of the gender impact of tax and benefit policies. You just have to be very careful about exactly how you interpret and present them. For example, suppose you were to raise the 40p or 45p rate of income tax, we know exactly the genders of the people who pay that on their incomes, and they will be overwhelmingly men. Does that mean it has no impact on the women to whom those men might be married? No, it does not, so you clearly need to put that in context. Equally, if you cut benefits for families or children, which are currently paid to the woman, will that have no effect on to whom they are married? No, it will not.107
116.The only equalities impact assessments that have been published on the Autumn Budget are within the “Tax information and impact notes” (TIINs) included within HMRC’s Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017.108 The Women’s Budget Group notes that the only [TIINs] where a gender impact has been identified are where the negative impact is disproportionately on men.109 These consisted of the changes in tobacco products duty rates (costing £40m per year) because “men are slightly more likely to smoke than women,”110 and the introduction of a supplementary charge for diesel cars111 (costing £15m per year) because “car buyers […] are more likely to be male than female”.112
117.The HMRC Overview of Tax and Legislation and Rates states that “it sets out the detail of each tax policy measure announced at Autumn Budget 2017”.113 However, it does not include any assessment of the fuel duty freeze for 2018–19, a policy that costs the Exchequer £850m.114
118.HMRC’s inclusion of a TIIN for the supplementary charge for diesel VED, which HMRC state will impact upon men more than women, suggests that data is available for vehicle driver characteristics. However, for another policy related to VED, the uprating of VED in general for vans, motorbikes and pre-2017 cars, the TIIN for states that “data is not collected on protected characteristics of VED payers”.115
119.The Treasury should use ONS and HMRC data to produce and publish robust equalities impact assessments of future Budgets, including the individual tax and welfare measures contained within them. A deficiency of data in respect of some protected characteristics is not a reason for failing to produce an analysis in respect of others for which data is available. Nor should the risk of misinterpretation or methodological complexity preclude the publication of an Equalities Impact Assessment. Details on methodology and guidance on interpretation can be set out alongside the analysis, just as they are with the existing distributional analysis.
120.The Committee notes that official statistics are currently used for such purposes, albeit inconsistently. For instance, HMRC concluded in its “Overview of Tax Legislation” that the supplementary charge for diesel car Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) negatively affects men more than women. It could equally use a gender breakdown of miles travelled by car in the National Travel Survey to draw conclusions about the impact of fuel duty, a policy which costs the Exchequer 56 times as much in foregone tax revenue as the changes to VED.
121.It appears inconsistent that the gender impact of the increase in VED for new diesel cars was able to be assessed, but such an assessment was not able to be produced for the uprating of VED in general for vans, motorbikes and pre-2017 cars. The Committee would welcome an explanation.
103 Q367
104 Q368
105 Q371
106 Q372
107 Q131
108 HM Revenue and Customs, Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017
109 Women’s Budget Group, A Chancellor tinkering at the margins: Women’s Budget Group response to Autumn Budget 2017, 2017
110 HM Revenue and Customs, Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017, p 152
111 HM Revenue and Customs, Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017, p 146
112 HM Revenue and Customs, Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017, p 86
113 HM Revenue and Customs, Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017, p 1
115 HM Revenue and Customs, Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates, 22 November 2017, p 144
19 January 2018