Finance Bill

Debate between Cat Smith and Jess Phillips

Monday 26th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

I feel the need to make all sorts of declarations of interest in this debate, having used sanitary products pretty much all my life.

I wish to pay credit to a number of women who have brought this subject to the House over the years. Without women in this place, I am certain that this issue would never have been raised, although I am delighted that so many men interested in Europe are in the Chamber to talk about it. Dawn Primarolo, a working-class woman brave enough to dare to speak up in Parliament about the taboo subject of women’s periods back in the year 2000, should be commended.

Today, when such topics are far easier for us to discuss, I have already received a number of sideways glances from colleagues around the estate on speaking about the subject and there is a certain desire among Conservative Members to say the word “products” instead of tampons. I know from speaking to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) today that, at the time, it was considered vulgar and even shameful that Ms Primarolo brought forward the subject. She was brave. Today, our brave woman prize goes to my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff). Regardless of what has been said on the other side of the House, doing nothing achieves nothing.

It is completely ridiculous that women are taxed, even at a 5% rate, for a product which, in my experience, is more than essential. The fact that we still have the tax is probably down in no small part to the fact that most of the people in the House and in our sister Parliaments all across the EU do not have wombs. The reason why we must force the Government to have a conversation with our European partners is that, without force, I fear that they will be too squeamish to talk about women’s periods. But they should not be: every person in the House exists only because their mother had a period. Today, with half term, Parliament has been teeming with children—my own have been on the slides in Portcullis House—who all exist only because their mothers had periods. It is nothing to be scared of, and nor should any man or woman ever feel that we should not talk about periods.

Such a revision in taxation may seem a marginal change, but it would make a huge difference to the women in this country. Having worked in a women’s refuge, I know that the things we had to stock up on the most—because they presented a challenge to the budgets of the women in our care—were nappies, tampons and sanitary towels.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that VAT is a very unequal tax and that it hits the poorest women in our communities hardest?