In his speech to Parliament on 4 September outlining the Boris Johnson government’s first spending plans, Chancellor Sajid Javid announced that ‘we can now afford to turn the page on austerity and move forward from a decade of recovery to a decade of renewal’. But for all the talk of ‘renewal’, the spending increases he outlined will make barely a dent in the last decade’s vicious cuts.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS):
- Day-to-day departmental spending was slashed by around 9% between 2010/11 and 2018/19, equivalent to around £30bn in today’s prices.
- Even after Javid’s increases, day-to-day government departmental spending in 2020/21 will still be 3% in monetary terms below the 2010/11 level.
- In per capita terms, only one third of the last decade’s spending cuts will have been reversed.
- If health, whose budget has risen by 19% over the period is excluded from the calculations, the overall reduction in day-to-day departmental spending between 2010/11 and 2018/19 is 20%.
The purpose of such brazen lies about ‘turn[ing] the page’ on austerity is political: Javid’s announcement is aimed purely at an upcoming election. He wants to build illusions in a bright post-Brexit future and the ability of a Johnson government to deliver it. Treasury sources told the Financial Times that they were ‘operating under instructions to turn into numbers the words that Mr Johnson issued when he entered Downing Street in July, when he promised to increase funding for what he calls “the people’s priorities”’ – health, ‘law and order’, and education.
The impact of austerity
Nine years of austerity has had a catastrophic social impact. Its effects since 2010 include:
- 54,000 deaths while waiting for a care package; 1.4 million older people today may have unmet care needs;
- Homelessness has risen by 165%;
- One fifth of the population, and one in every three children, now live in poverty;
- By 2021, welfare spending will have been slashed by a quarter.
One of the hardest hit areas has been funding for local government. By 2020/21 councils will have faced an overall cut of 60% to their Revenue Support Grants from central government – a loss of £16bn. As a result, spending on services by local authorities has been slashed by 21% since 2009/10.
The Local Government Association expects the funding gap for local authorities to be £5bn by 2020/21, rising to £8bn by 2024/25 as they become ever more reliant on council tax and business rates, alongside commercial investment. This is increasingly insufficient to cover even core services which councils have a statutory duty to provide. Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson says that of the £174m raised by Liverpool City Council in council tax revenues in 2017/18, £172m was spent on adult social care.
Social care spending by local authorities has been slashed by over £7bn since 2010, leading to 1.4 million being left with unmet needs. Other areas of spending have been slashed by around a third on average. 29% of councils told the Local Government Survey in February that in 2019/20 they were planning to reduce activity in adult social care; 24% that they were planning to reduce activity in children’s care services; 16% in special education and disability support; and 11% in homelessness support. The £2.9bn pledged by Javid amounts to a mere 18% of the amount lost since 2010, and leaves one in five councils at risk of declaring bankruptcy this financial year.
Labour councils: willing executioners
From the very beginning of the era of austerity, in 2010, Labour-run councils vowed to oppose cuts; and from the very beginning they set about implementing them. Completely typical of Labour councils across the country, not a single Nottingham Labour councillor has voted against cuts since they began in 2010. They have implemented over £200m of cuts in that time. Labour-run councils including Manchester have passed Public Spaces Protection Orders criminalising homelessness, and London’s Labour councils have been at the forefront of socially cleansing the working class from the capital. Far from victims of central government-imposed austerity, Labour councils have proven themselves to be active collaborators.
Séamus Padraic
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 272, October/November 2019
