Agenda Alliance responds to the 2025 Spring Budget

On 26 March 2025, Rachel Reeves MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented her Spring Budget statement. Our full response:

Across the country, women and girls facing multiple unmet needs are struggling to make ends meet. Over a decade of austerity, the long terms financial impacts of the pandemic, and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis are pushing them further into poverty, which is driving greater levels of social inequality. What we needed to see in today’s Spring Statement was a commitment to preventative action and support, which has long-term benefits for both women and the economy.

However, in the Chancellor’s announcement today, she made significant changes to disability and welfare benefits. This included Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a benefit disabled people can claim, whether they are in work or not, to support them with the additional costs of their disability, such as accessible travel and necessary health treatments. Under the Chancellor’s most drastic change of reducing eligibility to PIP benefits, the Government’s own assessment report found that 370,000 people will lose support with the average loss of £4,500-per-year. Additionally, the Women’s Budget Group noted that single women will be the largest group affected by the changes, making up 44% of those losing out, at an average of £1,610 a year.

Disabled women are disproportionately impacted by poverty, and should be receiving appropriate financial support, not having their vital benefits cut. They already experience other unmet needs that make accessing benefits more difficult, being more at risk of domestic abuse, nearly twice as likely to experience economic abuse, and almost four times more likely to have a partner prevent them (or try to) from accessing benefits they are entitled to. Our foundational report Hidden Hurt (2016) also found that half (52%) of the women who have experienced extensive sexual and physical violence in childhood and adulthood have a disability that means they need help with everyday activities, compared with a third (32%) of those with little experience of abuse. PIP provides many of these disabled women with a lifeline to support. Coordinated by the Women’s Budget Group, we, alongside our sister organisations, wrote to the Chancellor in advance of her statement to caution against cutting this vital benefit for disabled women.

Tackling demand preventatively and addressing the root causes of inequality must include combatting the spiraling rates of poverty that underlie much disadvantage, driving demand on public services. We must see this Government invest in social security and public services, rather than making those at the sharpest end of inequality suffer the most for our unstable economic outlook.