Wales Women’s Budget Group and WEN Wales welcome yesterday’s Draft Budget announcement and are pleased to see much-needed investment in Wales’s public services. However, we are concerned that this Draft Budget doesn’t go far enough to truly support women in Wales.

Due to persistent gender inequality, women – particularly single mothers, disabled women, ethnic minority and racialised women – have been hit harder by rising costs and are more likely to be employed in and rely on public services. In this context, we welcome the increased investment to the Welsh NHS, which has a predominantly female workforce, to tackle waiting times and improve patient outcomes. With almost a third of women in Wales who are economically inactive citing ill-health as the reason, we are particularly pleased to see £3 million has been allocated to strengthen women’s health services and progress the 10-year plan for women in Wales.

Positively, £1.2 million was allocated to support the delivery of the Violence against Women and Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence Strategy and provide survivors with essential support and advice. However, with providers facing cost and demand pressures at an all-time high, and likely to increase with rises to employer national insurance contributions, there remains a pressing need to develop a more sustainable legislative and funding framework for VAWDASV specialist services in Wales. 

We were encouraged to see Welsh Government acknowledge the value of social care and the need for a holistic approach to funding health and social care in Wales. However, with Welsh local authorities facing funding shortfalls of £559 million in 2025-26, it is unlikely that the announced funding for social care will meet cost pressures and help to address the significant issues of recruitment and retention across the sector. This imbalance in funding will disproportionately impact women in Wales, who make up 82% of the social care workforce.

While we were pleased to see an increase to the hourly rate paid to providers of Welsh Government’s Childcare Offer, this announcement does little to mitigate the successive budgetary cuts and delays to Welsh Government’s childcare commitments over the past year. Childcare in Wales remains fragmented, inaccessible and unaffordable, and its systematic deprioritisation will continue to push parents, particularly mothers, out of the workforce to make up for this shortfall in provision. As a key driver of gender inequality in Wales, today’s Budget represents a regrettable missed opportunity to address the fundamental issues with childcare in Wales and deliver the support that mothers in Wales desperately need.

A key way to avoid such unequal gendered impacts is to embed gender budgeting into the Welsh budgetary process. In this context, we welcome recent developments in this area such as the creation of an online gender budgeting resource for government officials and policymakers. We were also pleased to see marked improvements to this year’s Strategic Integrated Impact Assessment (SIIA), which represented a more intersectional and robust impact assessment than previous iterations.

There is still much further to go with regards to gender budgeting in Wales, however. We await the publication of the evaluations of Welsh Government’s remaining two gender budgeting pilots in 2025, and the development of further plans roll out gender budgeting more widely.

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WWBG Policy and Research Officer, Hannah Griffiths, said:

“Yesterday’s Draft Budget provided some welcome announcements for public services in Wales, but there is still more to do to deliver a budget that truly works for women. By embedding gender budgeting in the budgetary process, Welsh Government can tackle the social, economic and political barriers that women in Wales continue to face. Only by doing this can we address gender inequality at its root and avoiding any unequal gendered impacts of spending decisions.”

Women’s Equality Network Wales Director, Victoria Vasey, said:

“In terms of a tackling gender inequality in Wales, yesterday’s Draft Budget has some promise in its focus on funding public services and recognising the enormity of the problem of Violence Against Women and Girls.  However, some key opportunities have been missed, most disappointingly the failure to adequately fund childcare, hot on the heels of cuts last year.”

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