Emily Darlington

Milton Keynes MPs are like buses: you wait a long time, and two come at once. It costs us £133 billion every year because women are excluded from paid work on equal terms with men. I have worked closely with Members from across these Benches, as well as the Women’s Budget Group and the Good Growth Foundation, to put together an unashamedly female agenda for how we can realise the £113 billion of gross value added that we would see every year if women could fully participate in the economy. I want to thank my right hon. and hon. Friends the Treasury Ministers for their engagement on this really important document. I want to talk about what this Budget delivers for women. It bolsters us, it promotes us and it protects us. It bolsters us with paternity leave and adoption leave for self-employed people, with breakfast clubs and with VAT cuts in energy bills. We know that, more often than not, it is women who are trying to make the household bills add up at the end of the month and women who are the first people in the family to go without when there is not enough. The commitment to the gender pay gap and pay transparency is so important, but women are business owners too, particularly on our high streets, where our hairdressers and nail technicians are seeing business rate cuts. High-tech, high-investment, science-based industries will also have fair investment practices, with tech-forward standards to improve workplace culture, £200 million—double the previous commitment—for women-led businesses through the British Business Bank and a scale-up programme to help them flourish. Finally, this Budget protects women and girls. It establishes for the first time a misogyny taskforce to tackle the core issues that are holding women back, keeping them scared and destroying equality in our society, with £55 million of funding over two years to meet the commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. It will strengthen our law enforcement activity, improve protection for victims, and identify and disrupt harmful behaviours. This is a Budget for women, because if women succeed, our country succeeds.