In 2014, I started a petition to end the unfair and sexist “luxury” tax on period products. After years of campaigning, lobbying politicians, speaking with journalists, travelling the country to raise awareness, and amassing more than 300,000 signatures, there were two big breakthroughs. First, our campaign lobbied the government into establishing the tampon tax fund, through which almost £100m has been donated to female-focused charities. Second, in December 2020, Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, announced he was “proud” to finally end the 5% tax rate applied to period products.
Except there was a catch. Due to a simple administrative error, period pants (a reusable and environmentally friendly menstrual product) were wrongly categorised by HMRC as clothing rather than menstrual products. As a result, period pants are still being taxed today at 20%. We’ll never know why this happened, but I suspect a general lack of knowledge about periods probably didn’t help, and period stigma may have stopped anyone from correcting the error.
Last week, Marks & Spencer launched a campaign to address this problem. The retail company asked HMRC to recategorise period pants as the essential item they most definitely are, so they can escape tax.
The M&S campaign is important because it promotes choice. We all have different experiences of periods and at least 10% of us have conditions such as endometriosis that result in painful cramps. We need a diverse range of products so we can best manage our needs. Also, the government should not be capitalising on sexism, which is what is happening so long as it accrues tax revenue from period products.
But there is a serious problem with the campaign: it is the definition of virtue signalling because it makes M&S seem concerned about sexist taxes when, in fact, its primary interest is maximising profits. Here’s why my cynicism is justified.
It has been two and a half years since Sunak announced the end of the tampon tax (on all products except period pants). You would expect products to be cheaper as a result. Yet a report by the not-for-profit advisory firm Tax Policy Associates found they are hardly any cheaper today than they were in 2020, even after adjusting for inflation.
This is for a simple and extremely disappointing reason: retailers have kept prices the same and pocketed the reduction in tax as profits, amounting to an estimated £15m every year. This is the amount of money the government used to give out yearly as part of the tampon tax fund prior to the VAT tax cut. In total, this means customers have lost out on almost £39m in savings since the tampon tax ended in 2021. We are still being penalised for having periods to the tune of millions of pounds.
This is even more abhorrent given the ongoing cost of living crisis, throughout which retailers have constantly claimed they’re doing all they can to support consumers. Yet they didn’t reduce the price of their period products to coincide with the end of the tax.
M&S is one of the chains that has failed to reduce the cost of period products, or that has at least failed to prove it isn’t pocketing the extra money it has received as a result of the tax ending. Recently, I started a new petition calling on retailers to reduce the price of sanitary products in line with the end of the tampon tax. We gained 150,000 signatures in a matter of months, but M&S has yet to respond to our calls or tweets.
When approached for this article, the company said: “When the government announced the removal of VAT from these products in the 2020 budget, we factored this into our pricing for 2021, when the VAT change came into effect and, despite significant inflation across the market, we’ve kept prices flat on around half the range we sell.”
While the statement may convey a sense of seriousness, it is yet more smoke and mirrors. Once the tampon tax ended, we should have seen an immediate reduction in prices across the whole period product range. The company also doesn’t specify when the supermarket began to flatten prices and the Tax Policy Institute’s original report suggests this actually never happened. The expert behind the report, Dan Neidle, has kindly offered to analyse M&S’s tax data for free to verify any claims, but the supermarket has yet to engage with us, which in itself speaks volumes.
The question is then: if M&S has not reduced the price of period products despite the tampon tax ending, then why is it campaigning to end another tax? The unfortunate evidence tells us the company is unlikely to reduce the cost of period pants. It seems as though this is a campaign for M&S to increase its profits, masquerading as an effort to increase gender equality, at the same time as boosting its brand reputation.
This is particularly the case because period pants are one of the most expensive period products on the market, with the highest tax rate. If the tax were axed and the products sold at their current price, M&S could make profits far exceeding those from other period products.
It’s time to stop weaponising periods. The point of ending tax on sanitary products is to make them more accessible, not to make retailers richer. Don’t you agree, M&S?
• Laura Coryton is a campaigner, author and founder of the social enterprise Sex Ed Matters
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