STOP TAXING PERIODS

Photocredits - www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

Finishing a period; leaving only one tampon in the box: you never consider it a forthcoming trauma at the time, but 28 days later finding yourself foraging through stacks of cosmetic bags and purses in search of a stray tampon or sanitary towel, it becomes a pretty rubbish situation. It’s a frustrating dilemma as is, without the knowledge that the government currently implicate a 5% tax on the tampons and pads that they class as ‘luxury items’.

Personally, I don’t view a tampon as 'inessential but desirable'. Literally, it is not impossible to live without sanitary products, but it would be extremely unhygienic, and would jeopardise a woman’s personal safety. In short: we cannot lead normal lives without tampons/pads.

Ending tampon tax has been something that’s popped up on my Twitter feed more frequently in recent weeks: Austin Williams was snapped wearing a tee-shirt that read ‘tampons should be free’, and the change.org petition launched last May has had widespread popularity amongst women and men alike. Though the tax was cut from a shocking 17.5% to 5% in 2000, the responsibility to get it down to zero lies in the hands of George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, to convince the European Parliament to revise their policies on what counts as a ‘luxury item’. Today, the petition was given to 11, Downing Street, and it's had great recognition from the government...we are definitely on our way to ending period tax. For more information on the steps that need to be taken now, read campaigner Laura Coryton's five step plan to ending the tax for good.

'Throw them at Cameron until it works'

To further aggravate myself on the issue, I decided to work out how much the average menstrual cycle costs a woman in her lifetime. Take a box of 20 regular absorbency Tampax pearl tampons: £2.99 for a box; you change them every four hours. If you wake up at seven and go to sleep at eleven - that works out as four tampons a day, costing 60p. If a period lasts 5 days, that’s £3 per period; one period a month makes it £36 a year. According to Google, the average woman starts her period at 12 and reaches menopause at 51 (that’s 39 long years…). This means the average woman spends £1404 on tampons in her lifetime, assuming she doesn't have a particularly heavy flow; never uses more than four a day, and never wears one to bed.

Obviously, there’s the option of purchasing cheaper supermarket alternatives, but every girl knows that with sanitary products, you really do pay for what you get. And even so, it’s not just the price put on the tampons: it’s the morality of taxing them as ‘luxury items’. If crocodile steaks, edible sugar flowers and helicopters can go tax-free, then we should not be taxed on the ‘luxury’ of a period. Sign the petition, and change this for good!

https://www.change.org/p/george-osborne-stop-taxing-periods-period