The UK Women’s Budget Group worked with the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, to produce a report on the impact of public spending cuts on Black and Minority Ethnic women in the UK. This was a major piece of work that had taken several months to research and write.
The original plan had been to launch the report in early summer 2017. However, when the Prime Minister announced that there would be a snap election in June we decided to postpone publication. This was for two reasons:
- The election offered campaigning opportunities for both organisations that they did not want to miss, reducing the time to prepare the report for publication.
- With media attention focused on the election it was likely that the report would get overlooked.
A date was then set for an autumn launch. Just over a week before the launch we discovered that the government was planning to launch the report of its Race Equality Audit on the same day. Again, there was a danger that the WBG/Runnymede report would be overlooked with all the media focus on the government report. We decided to ‘piggy back’ on the government report launch, by making clearly visible links between the findings of our report and the government’s report.
With this approach, we made it easy for journalists to tie the two stories together and mention the findings of our research in their coverage of the government’s report.