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.
