Oldham Labour has criticised Jeremy Hunt’s failure to reverse damaging proposals targeting low-paid women, despite making historic u-turn on the Tories’ disastrous mini-budget.

Having already u-turned on the plan to abolish the 45% tax rate for higher earners, Hunt today confirmed other plans would also be abandoned. The Tory Chancellor confirmed u-turns on reducing basic income tax to 19%, a planned reversal of off-payroll working, freezing alcohol duty and planned dividend changes. He also reduced the government’s energy price guarantee from two years to just six months.

But the statement has drawn criticism as other proposals benefiting richer people are still going ahead, including abolishing the cap on bankers’ bonuses, at expense of low earners, particularly women.

The disastrous mini-budget includes proposed benefit changes pulling thousands of people who are entitled to Universal Credit and work less than 15 hours a week into a harsher sanctions regime. Under these proposals, people working less than 15 hours a week will have to meet the “intensive work search regime”, which means weekly or fortnightly meetings with a job coach and having to spend up to 35 hours job hunting a week. This will affect thousands of Universal Credit claimants in Oldham.

Office of National Statistics figures show that women are more affected by this than men – just under 2/3 of Oldham people working less than 15 hours a week are women.

Councillor Amanda Chadderton, Leader of the Council and member for Royton South said ‘We can all see how unfair the Tories’ tax proposals are – the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that for every £1 given to households in tax changes, the Tories are taking £2 away[i]. To add insult to injury they also plan to make it harder for people to claim Universal Credit. The only guarantee we can rely on from the Tories is that they will take from the poor to give to the rich, with low paid and women hurt the most. Today was an opportunity for Jeremy Hunt to address this gross inequality and he has failed.”

The proposals were meant to encourage more people to get into work, but Government statistics show that most people in Oldham who are not working are retired, long-term sick or disabled, students or looking after home and family. Again, women are ten times more likely than men in Oldham to be carers.

Councillor Chadderton added ‘Looking at the reasons why people don’t work helps us to understand why there is such a large gap between women and men. In Oldham, the answer is largely unpaid care. Almost 10 times more women than men in Oldham are economically inactive because they are looking after their home or family. This will include mothers who are caring for their children, grandmothers who are caring for their grandchildren, and women providing care for elderly or disabled relatives. If these women are pushed into paid employment, who will do this care work when both the childcare and adult social care sectors are not currently fit to plug the gaps?’

The Government has refused to publish research it has paid for to find out whether sanctions work or not. The independent House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee has warned that Department for Work and Pension’s repeated failures to release research “could undermine the trust [of] the public, parliament and the department”.

Councillor Chadderton also pointed out ‘We don’t even know if sanctions work. What we do know is that when claimants were sanctioned, their benefit payments were stopped or reduced, plunging them into financial crisis’.