What's the issue?

The public sector equality duty (PSED), contained in the Equality Act 2010, requires public bodies to have ‘due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between different people’ when carrying out their activities. This applies to all ‘protected characteristics’, such as race, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, and to policy-making at all levels – central, national and local.

The PSED has had a positive impact on equality practice within public authorities and, to a limited extent, in policy-making. However, its aim was to bring about a transformative approach to equality by going beyond simply outlawing discrimination to tackle inequality at a structural level. The duty has failed to fulfil this aim.

In particular, there has been a failure to consider the gender equality impact of a number of economic policies. This is true not only of the government, but also of the manifesto commitments of opposition parties (with the exception of the Women's Equality Party).

Analysis

The Equality Act 2010, which included the PSED, was one of the last Acts passed under the Labour government. Practice in implementing it has therefore been set by the coalition and subsequent Conservative governments.

The coalition government made a number of changes to the duty that reduced both its scope and its effectiveness. These included the removal of the socioeconomic duty, which would have required policy-makers to consider the impact of their policies on income-based inequality as well as other forms of inequality.

The government has also weakened the PSED in its implementation. It has significantly cut the budget and remit of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the body responsible for monitoring and enforcement of the PSED. Ministers have questioned the need for public bodies to carry out equality impact assessments (EIAs) and government departments have failed to publish them, making it impossible to judge whether ‘due regard’ has been paid to equality considerations.

After decades of neoliberal policies, growing inequality has left many of us leading increasingly insecure lives. A genuine social security system has become all the more necessary, but, instead, austerity has undermined even the minimal safety net system we once had.

Opportunities for the financial services industry have replaced social policy in this area. This has led to increases in household debt, with catastrophic consequences for some. Unregulated lending has also led to house price rises that have put proper housing beyond the reach of most young people. And we can no longer rely on the state pension to provide for our old age. Instead, we have a system that has privatised responsibility for provision in old age, relying on people saving in private and occupational pensions, helped by massive tax hand-outs to those who can afford to save most. This will leave those whose lifetime earnings are reduced by disability, discrimination or time spent out of the labour market caring for others, particularly women, in poverty in their old age.

Rather than being recognised as providing income security for all, the social security system has been recast as ‘welfare’ for the ‘not very deserving’ poor. This has enabled billions of pounds to be taken from the incomes of the poorest, until recently almost without protest, on the pretext of reducing the deficit, while at the same time income tax, the fairest tax we have, has been cut. Again, it is those whose earning capacity is most restricted who have paid the most for these policies. As the House of Commons Library has shown, by 2020 women will have paid for 86 per cent of the costs of fiscal consolidation achieved by changes in personal taxes and benefits since 2010, while men will have paid for just 14 per cent.

This policy ideas presented in this part of the book consider how some of these issues could be addressed and how the social security system could be reconstructed to become the basis of genuine social solidarity between individuals and generations. They start with innovative ideas for beginning to tackle the debt and housing crises, by Johnna Montgomerie, and Beth Stratford and Duncan McCann respectively.

People's standard of living depends not only on their incomes, but also on the level and standard of public services they have access to. Indeed, for the poorest households and those that use public services the most, benefits and public services – ‘benefits in kind’ – contribute a larger proportion of their standard of living than their own earnings. Austerity policies have therefore had a particularly catastrophic impact on the living standards of those who are most dependent on public services, such as those with a disability, older people and children.

But attacks on public services were happening long before the financial crash and subsequent austerity policies. Many previously publicly provided services had been contracted out to private sector providers, even when still publicly funded. The ostensible reason for such marketisation varied for different types of services, but invariably part of the justification rested on a claim that private provision was more efficient, and so through lower costs would save ‘taxpayers’ money’. It was not so frequently recognised that those lower costs arose, at least in part, from private providers being able to employ a more casualised, less unionised and often less skilled workforce than the public sector.

Citizens have also been persuaded to see themselves as consumers, benefiting from being able to exercise choice, fuelling competition between providers in delivering value for money. Some previously public services have been almost entirely replaced by individual budgets. These enable, and in some cases force, eligible recipients, such as those with disabilities, to exercise choice as to how to spend the budget they are given. However, with budgets not high enough to allow much freedom, such choice is more illusory than real. One outcome has been a decline in collective provision and increased loneliness as individual budgets are spent on individualised services.

Further, it has proved easy to allow the real value of individual budgets to be eroded (much easier, perhaps, than to do so to the pay of unionised public sector workers). As a result, deteriorating workers’ conditions, through, for example, the increasing use of zero-hours contracts, have provided gains in efficiency, but have not benefited the recipients of public services. Rather, they have enabled expenditure to be reduced, or not to grow in line with the rising needs of an ageing population.

What's the issue?

Spending on high-quality public services is one of the best investments that a society can make. With access to such services, children grow up to be better educated, more productive and more contented citizens. Effective public services also boost wellbeing and reduce suffering among adults, preventing a greater need for spending on services in the future. All these are reasons for seeing judicious spending on public services as a worthwhile investment.

Public services, such as education, childcare, health and social care, are also the core of a country's social infrastructure, benefiting the whole society, not only those who are currently using those services. The care system, for example, should be seen as part of our social infrastructure because we all benefit from knowing that proper care will be there for us when we need it. We can also contribute better to society when we are less concerned as to whether those for whom we feel responsible are receiving good quality care.

However, when the government talks of investing in infrastructure, it means spending to build physical infrastructure, power stations, roads or railways, for example. When the aim is to stimulate the economy, investing in social infrastructure is rarely considered, even though it is particularly good at generating new employment opportunities. This bias is not only short-sighted, denying us investment in vital public services; it also increases gender inequalities. The extra jobs generated by constructing physical infrastructure are largely filled by men, whereas the jobs created by investment in social infrastructure are more likely to be filled by women.

Analysis

‘Investment’ means spending money now on producing benefits for the future. Any government spending can stimulate the economy, but it is usually investment spending that is proposed when a stimulus is wanted. In that way the economy gains in two ways: from the longer-term benefits that the investment was designed to provide and from higher levels of employment and better use of resources now.

In this chapter we shall be exploring one of Marx's most important concepts, that of reproduction. We shall look at the ways in which he did use it and also consider the reasons why he did not use it in some other ways. It may seem strange to spend so much time on what Marx (and Engels) did not do, but considering this omission and the reasons for it may throw light on some fundamental features of Marx's method. In particular, it should help us understand what underlies his materialist conception of history and assess the feminists' basic criticism: that its concentration on production rather than human reproduction means that it is not adequate to the task of explaining gender differences in society and understanding the history of struggle over them.

The plan of the chapter is as follows: First we shall examine Marx's use of the term reproduction to refer to the reproduction of whole social systems, in particular, their class structure. Then we shall consider whether accounts of how social systems reproduce themselves are complete if they do not include human reproduction, the way that people within such systems are born and raised to occupy particular class and gender positions. After this, we shall look at what Marx and Engels had to say about human reproduction and what significance they gave to the consideration of its social forms in their historical analysis. We shall find that their record on this matter is ambivalent - they seem to give human reproduction more importance in describing their historical method than in their actual analyses - and we shall explore why this should have happened. Finally, we shall look at some directions in which work that stays within the Marxist tradition but accords human reproduction more importance might go.