Hello all 153,369 of you,

I hope you're having a lovely week.

Thank you to the hundreds of you who emailed the main retailers, asking them to drop the price of period products in line with tampon tax ending!

We have a big update to share with you: Boots replied! I've added a screenshot of this response from Boots' Chief Customer and Category Officer, Steve Ager.

As might be expected, this letter is disappointing. However, there are some positives to focus on, including that we now have direct contact with the big players at Boots which means we're one step closer to succeeding.

You can find a copy of my response below.

As a next step, we have asked Steve at Boots if we can meet with him to discuss this issue. To help us achieve this, please may you click on the 'tweet' button at the bottom of this update? This will automatically tweet Boots requesting a meeting while also raising awareness of Steve's uninspiring response. 

Thank you so much for helping us get this far! This is a big step in the right direction. I know we can get there!

Many thanks and have a lovely weekend,

Laura 

-------------------------------------------------------------

Hello X,

Thank you very much for this letter.

To be honest, it is quite disappointing, as we know over 300 people have emailed you providing the evidence Steve asks for in his letter.

As these emails say, a report recently provided evidence that retailers have failed to lower the price of period products in line with tampon tax ending. This report shows that while manufactures of period products have dropped their prices, retailers and supermarkets such as yours have not.

As you'll know, over 150,000 people have signed my petition, calling on you to drop the price of your period products as soon as possible and especially during the cost of living crisis.

I'm glad to hear you care about tackling period poverty. However, it is wrong for you to claim you have lowered the price of period products without providing evidence of this, especially as evidence exists to disprove your claim in the form of the report mentioned above. 

As stated, both in the hundreds of emails sent to you, and in our petition signed by 150,000 people and counting, we are asking you to please prove you have dropped the price of your period products by emailing myself with detailed monthly pricing data for all period products from January 2020 to December 2021. If you dropped your prices at an earlier date, please provide this data covering a relevant time period. Once we confirm you have indeed dropped your prices, we will be able to showcase your store as a shining example, which others can follow.

Alternatively, myself and a member of the Tax Policy Associates would be happy to meet with you to discuss this issue.

Just to be clear, only then will we be able to stop lobbying you to do the right thing and lower your prices.

We expect you to retain all of this data for your own purposes, and so we understand it will be relatively simple for you to obtain. We are also happy to sign an NDA and agree not to release any of the prices you provide to us, or indeed any confidential information relating to your stores other than the conclusion we reach from analysing the data.

We are working with the Tax Policy Associates to analyse this data and they are experts in handling datasets much larger than this, so we are well prepared to read this data once it is emailed to us. 

We look forward to working with you to put this right and ensure the tampon tax ending benefits those it was designed to support: consumers.

As the Government used to generate £15m every year in revenue from tampon tax, we feel it is grossly unfair for retailers to turn this money directly into profit, when instead it should be converted to savings for consumers.

A government spokesperson recently told the Guardian: “We have kept our promise to scrap the tampon tax to make sanitary products more affordable, and urge retailers to pass the savings on to shoppers.”

I hope you share this vision and look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Laura Coryton