The High Court  has  refused permission to the Fawcett Society to challenge the legality of the government’s emergency budget.  The challenge was on the grounds of discrimination against women as they would bear the brunt of the cuts.  The challenge was perhaps doomed to fail as it is not clear what the remedy would have been.  Declaring the budget unlawful does not seem useful.

Interesting to note that the government did concede that it should have carried out equality impact assessments on the budget.  Hopefully this important assessment process will now get more backing from the public sector in order to deliver better services for all members of society.