Harriet Knights

In response to the elevated number of homeless people in Bedford, Bedford Girls’ School Lower Sixth IB students have been looking to tackle this pressing issue.

In particular, we have focused on homeless women on their period, and their access (or lack of) to sanitary products.

Furthermore, we have joined the campaign to remove the tax on these products. After introducing our cause in a whole school assembly, we encouraged all the girls to sign the petition to remove the 5% tax on sanitary products such as panty liners and tampons. These items are taxed because they are deemed a luxury item. For every woman going through her period, tampons are not luxuries, they are necessities. Yet crocodile steaks, perhaps agreed by many to be a luxury and therefore unnecessary item, are exempt from the tax.

We also talked about the impact homelessness has on women and how periods make living on the streets even more difficult.

Once a month homeless women do not have the funds to look after their sanitary needs, they are often forced to use rags or toilet paper instead. In homeless shelters, men’s razors and condoms are often provided free of charge, tampons and other sanitary items are scarce and expensive.

In the assembly, we also urged our fellow students to bring in packs of pads and tampons, as well as other products such as underwear and deodorant. In only two weeks, we managed to collect over 4,300 items of sanitary products to donate to homeless shelters.

As the first part of our campaign was so successful, we decided to continue fighting for our cause.

We are now going to be sleeping out on Cardington Road on the night of Friday 10th February. Our aim is to sleep rough for one night to allow us to empathise with the homeless and how they survive outside in the freezing cold of winter.

For the sleep out, we are kindly asking if you could donate to our cause in order to fundraise for the homeless charity The King’s Arms.