Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Lynne Featherstone]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. He is right to say that certain forms of hate crime do not have the same aggravated status as others. That is being reviewed as we speak by the Ministry of Justice.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Reform of the EHRC must not be carried out because the Government are running scared of the action that the EHRC is rightly taking against the Government on the spending review. The House of Commons Library has now assessed the tax and benefit measures in the spending review and previous Budgets, and its figures show that Labour’s last two Budgets gave more help to women, whereas the spending review and the emergency Budget after the election are hitting women more than twice as hard as men. When women still earn less and own less than men, why have the Government decided that women should pay more?

[Lynne Featherstone]

The right hon. Lady has raised this issue before, and she rightly says that the EHRC is doing what it is meant to do as an independent body. It is currently on the information trail, asking for information appertaining to the comprehensive spending review. All Departments are assessing the impact on equality and this Government have acted to protect the lowest-paid public sector workers, most of whom are women, from the public sector pay freeze. We have taken the lowest earners—800,000 people, most of whom are women—out of taxation. This Government have acted to protect women.