Edinburgh gender budget bid defeated as councillors 'struggle to understand it'
| Published date | 17 June 2022 |
| Author | Donald Turvill |
| Publication title | EdinburghLive (Scotland) |
Greens councillor Alys Mumford moved the motion - her first since being elected last month - at the finance committee on Thursday (June 17).
She said gender budgeting is an "internationally-recognised tool to recognise and reflect the lived experiences of women" and would "ensure that our spending decisions aren't, however inadvertently, further entrenching inequality".
However, her request for a report looking into it and engagement between the council and the Scottish Women's Budget Group was voted down by Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative members.
Convener Mandy Watt, Labour, proposed taking 'no action' and said voting the motion through would be "jumping quite far ahead ahead of committee and councillors actually understanding what this is about".
"I do appreciate how strongly [Cllr Mumford] feels about this and the potential benefits there could be but we just don't really understand it well enough," she said.
She added that a workshop on gender budgeting could be arranged to inform councillors further.
The SNP's Marco Biagi told the committee the request was simply a "scoping exercise" that made no firm committments and added: "I'm quite surprised that is being seen as too much by some members of this committee."
Cllr Mumford requested her motion be reffered to a full council meeting which will allow all elected members to debate and vote on it at the end of this month.
She said: "This was the first committee meeting after a full council where everyone spoke about supporting anti-poverty measures, which this is, supporting equality measures, which this is, and spoke about collaberative working, which this was, so an attempt to do that was quite eye-opening for me as a new councillor and my first motion to be brought.
"I was sitting in the committee with a majority of men talking against this motion on gender budgeting.
"It did seem very political and it'll be interesting to see what happens at full council if it follows those same party lines."
What is gender budgeting?
Gender budgeting is defined by the Council of Europe as 'gender based assessment of budgets...
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