Chancellor George Osborne called it a progressive budget, the Fawcett Society for equal rights argues it is not lawful, and now the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) reports the proposals by the millionaire politician will hit the poor - and so women who are the lower paid - the hardest.
Reuters says the findings by the IFS are embarrassing for the Coalition Government and will make it harder to gain public support for the proposed cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent. The unions say the proposals will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Low-income households of working age lose the most as a proportion of income from the tax and benefit changes. Those who lose the least are households of working age with no children in the top half of the income distribution, according to the IFS.
The Fawcett Society has told WVoN that the Government had a legal obligation to conduct an equality impact assessment of all proposed budgetary cuts - which it has yet to prove it has done - and that the budget as it stood was massively unfair to women (and see previous WVoN coverage).
