I will go through it.
First of all, I will say that the UK Women's Budget Group has now been functioning for about 20 years. As you know, having heard from our Scottish sister organizations, there are other similar organizations operating in other parts of the U.K., principally in Scotland and Wales. Scotland is actually some way ahead of us, I would say, in terms of gender budgeting.
We call ourselves the UK Women's Budget Group because we work principally on the economic and fiscal policies that are implemented by the U.K. government. We're a membership organization—we draw our members from women's organizations, from researchers, and academics—and we rely on our members for the expertise we bring to analysis of public policy.
We're supported by one paid project officer and by volunteers and interns, and we're funded through independent charitable foundations. We don't receive any funding from government.
The evidence I'm going to give will focus on the relationship between the Women's Budget Group and government. That is my particular area of expertise. I'm not an economist by training. My background is in gender mainstreaming within government.
What the Women's Budget Group seeks to do is to influence government in developing and setting both its annual budget and its general economic and fiscal policies. We see this work as an integral part of gender mainstreaming, following on from the U.K.'s commitments under the Beijing Platform for Action, because we see that adequate resources are essential in order to implement gender equality policies.
We believe that gender budgeting ensures that policy is evidence-based and is therefore more effective in achieving the objectives the government wants to set. But this efficiency argument is also based on the political premise that gender equality is a desirable political objective in itself.
This touches, of course, on the question of whether gender budgeting is a political activity or not. I believe that gender budgeting is first and foremost a better and more informed way of making policy and developing evidence-based policy. But it's also political in the sense that we in the Women's Budget Group and other women's budget groups across the world apply a feminist perspective to the work. We're challenging traditional gender roles and traditional divisions of labour, so for that reason I would also call it a political activity.
At the U.K. level, we've had some significant changes recently in our law, in our policies and procedures, and in some of the government machinery. I just want to run through those, because they set the context of the gender budgeting work and provide some opportunities for us to promote gender budgeting.
First of all, we have a Minister for Women and Equality who oversees the whole equalities agenda. Until recently she was simply the Minister for Women, giving her responsibility for all equality—all of the equalities agenda is a fairly recent innovation. She is now supported by a Government Equalities Office—also very recently set up—which is a government department in itself. Previously she was supported by a small unit that lived within the department that she had the main portfolio for.
So our minister for women traditionally has always held other government ministerial posts, and in fact our current minister for women is not an exception to that—and I'll come back to that. But she does have her own small government department now, which has just been set up. We believe this could produce a natural focal point for gender budgeting.
The Women and Equality Unit co-sponsored us to run a gender expenditure analysis project with the Treasury department here, and I'll say a little bit more about that later on. Treasury also has an equalities champion at a senior level who drives forward activity on this issue, and I think that's a very helpful initiative.
The Government Equalities Office also sponsors another newly created body, which is the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, to which I think my Scottish colleagues referred. The role of that commission is to offer independent advice and scrutiny to the government on equalities issues.
Originally we had three equalities commissions, working on race, on disability, and on women's equality—the Equal Opportunities Commission, which looked at gender. Those three commissions have now been subsumed into one, and they've also taken on responsibility for human rights and for protection of groups: of LGBT groups, of groups on the basis of age, and groups on the basis of faith. They take forward the whole equalities agenda, among them.
Women's organizations were quite ambivalent about that change. On the one hand, we could see that bringing the whole equalities agenda together might be an advantage for gender equality because it would give a stronger voice within government. On the other hand, we were very concerned about the possible loss of focus on gender because we see gender inequality as in some ways quite different from other forms of discrimination.
We also have a new law, a gender equality duty, which you may already know about. That came into law about a year ago. This duty requires all public bodies to promote gender equality—equality between the sexes. It means they have to carry out gender impact assessments of all new and existing policies. They also have to publish a three-year gender equality scheme, which sets priority gender equality objectives.
We believe this could be a key lever to introduce better gender budgeting, and certainly better gender mainstreaming generally. That will be a key lever for the equality human rights commission to use to determine whether government is meeting its quality objectives or not.
The other mechanism I wanted to mention to you is that all central government departments are required to publish public service agreements, PSAs. These set out their key high-level targets. There are a number of cross-departmental PSAs, some that relate only to a particular department and some that run across departments. There is an equalities PSA that sets some equality objectives.
These PSAs set measurable outputs for each department within the context of the comprehensive spending review, which is a three-year review and allocation of government spending. It sets out identified allocations of funding to each department.
One of the priorities in one of those PSAs is the need to close the gender pay gap, which is quite a significant pay gap in the U.K.; it hovers around the 18% mark for people in full-time work. If you look at part-time work, the gender pay gap is more around 44%, so it's quite significant. I believe we're still amongst the highest in Europe for that; I think we're either the first or the second in Europe in terms of our gender pay gap. The government has set closing that gap as one of the key priorities within its PSA.
The link I've just been describing here between targets and resources in budgets is still not as transparent as we in the Women's Budget Group would like.
That's the machinery and that's some of the context within which we're working.