Scrap the woman tax

It's the year 2000 and I'm sitting at a wooden lab desk in my Year 6 primary school science class, sun shining through the big glass windows, learning about the birds and the bees and all that jazz.

I remember my primary school science teacher well: a no-nonsense Polish woman often forced to repeat the catch phrase—when faced with a class of squeamish 10-year-olds half-fascinated, half-repulsed by the birds and the bees—“But it's only natural!”

On this particular occasion she was teaching us about—prepare for squealing children—puberty. And she was annoyed. “The government has a tax on sanitary pads,” she ranted. “A tax on something that women need to leave the house each month. A tax on being a woman!”

I was 10 years old, I wasn't too fussed about the intricacies of VAT, but for some reason this has stuck with me. And it seems all the more infuriating now—14 years on, in 2014—because that tax is still in place. Pads, panty liners, tampons—anything, in fact, “designed solely for the absorption or collection of menstrual flow,” according to HMRC's own definition, is bizarrely not considered to be a basic or essential item, and is therefore subject to a 5 per cent VAT rate. That is as opposed to essential goods and services, which are exempt (or effectively exempt, as far as the consumer is concerned), such as certain foods, clothing and even pads designed primarily for incontinence rather than menstruation.

There have been many campaigns over the years from the public, individual MPs and retailers. Asda at one point stopped charging customers tax on sanitary products, preferring to take the hit themselves. And those campaigns have had an impact: the tax has been lowered significantly since 2000, when it was charged at 17.5 per cent—the full VAT rate at that time—to a reduced rate of 5 per cent.

The reluctance to scrap it entirely seems strange, but then the whole VAT system is strange. In theory, basic and essential items should be VAT free or at least subject to reduced rates. Yet if you want to buy toothpaste or cleaning products, you have to pay VAT on that, while if you're in the market for an (arguably less essential) helicopter, cake decorations or ticket to the zoo, you'll get away VAT free. Things get even more ridiculous: if you're buying shortbread topped with caramel and chocolate there will be no VAT to pay ("that's because it's millionaire's shortbread and they don't pay tax," quipped comedian Josie Long when I put this out on Twitter), but if you want shortbread topped with just chocolate (no caramel) you'll have to pay the full 20 per cent.

The entire system needs an overhaul. But even so, when royal icing, traditional Indian sweets and even airships are VAT free, how is it possible to maintain that sanitary products—which, as my teacher pointed out, women have to buy simply to leave the house and go to work for several days of every month—should not be? I suppose this is what happens when most of the people making the rules are men.

British policymakers had plenty of opportunities to scrap the tax and they didn't. But since the 1990s there has been a new problem, too. It has repeatedly been reported that the UK government reduced the VAT rate on sanitary products to 5 per cent in order to fall in line with EU regulations. In fact, the EU directives aimed at harmonising VAT across the Union since the 90s have allowed the tax on sanitary products to be reduced to “no less” than 5 per cent—meaning sanitary products across Europe are subject to a VAT rate of at least that.

I was recently asked to sign a petition on www.change.org calling on George Osborne to scrap the tax on sanitary products. I signed it with enthusiasm; getting British politicians behind the campaign to scrap the tampon tax is key. But the people we really need to be hassling are over in Brussels, not Westminster (I note that most of the people making the rules there are men, too).

Europe: let's scrap the woman tax. And while we're at it, let's take the VAT off toothpaste too. We need it after all that tax-free millionaire's shortbread we've been eating.