The United Kingdom government austerity programme is a fiscal policy undertaken by the government of the United Kingdom in response to the Great Recession in the UK. It is a deficit reduction programme and it consists of sustained reductions in public spending, intended to reduce the government budget deficit and the welfare state in the United Kingdom. The NHS and education have been "ringfenced" and protected from spending cuts. United Kingdom austerity policies have received pointed criticism from Leftist politicians and economists, and have prompted anti-austerity movements among citizens more generally.
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History
Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008 a period of economic recession began in the UK. In 2009, the term "age of austerity" was popularized by British Conservative leader David Cameron in his keynote speech to the Conservative Party forum in Cheltenham on 26 April 2009, in which he committed to end years of what he characterized excessive government spending. The austerity programme was initiated in 2010 by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. Its original stated goal was to, "achieve [a] cyclically-adjusted current balance by the end of the rolling, five-year forecast period". At the June 2010 budget, the end of the forecast period was 2015–16. However, in a speech in 2013 David Cameron indicated that his government had no intention of increasing public spending once the structural deficit had been eliminated and proposed that the public spending reduction be made permanent. In 2014 the Treasury extended the proposed austerity period until at least 2018. By 2016 the Chancellor George Osborne was aiming to deliver a budget surplus by 2020, but following the result of the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016, he expressed the opinion that this goal was no longer achievable. His successor as Chancellor, Philip Hammond, retained the aim of a balanced budget but abandoned plans to eliminate the deficit by 2020. In Hammond's first Autumn statement in 2016 there was no mention of austerity, and some commentators have concluded that the austerity program has ended.
Demographics
In 2016 research from the Women’s Budget Group and the Runnymede Trust indicated that women, people of colour and in particular women of colour have been affected most by austerity, and that they will continue to be affected disproportionately until 2020. This is due to the fact that black and Asian women are more likely to be employed in the public sector, be in low-paid jobs and insecure work, and experience higher levels of unemployment than other groups.
Food banks
Researchers have linked budget cuts and sanctions against benefit claimants to increasing use of food banks. A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2015 found that each one percentage point increase in the rate of Jobseeker's Allowance claimants sanctioned was associated with a 0.09 percentage point rise in food bank use.
However, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that people answering yes to the question "Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?" decreased from 9.8% in 2007 to 8.1% in 2012, leading some to say that the rise was due to both more awareness of food banks, and the government allowing Jobcentres to refer people to food banks when they were hungry, in contrast to previous governments.
Health services
A 2016 report authored by the NatCen Social Research for UNISON shows that LGBT people have suffered from a lack of access to mental health services as a result of austerity.
In 2017, the Royal Society of Medicine said that government austerity decisions in health and social care were likely to have resulted in 30,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2015.
Criticism
The austerity programme has faced opposition from disability rights groups for disproportionately affecting disabled people. The under-occupancy penalty (commonly known as the "bedroom tax") is an austerity measure that has attracted particular criticism. This reduces the amount of housing benefit available for those living in a house with a bedroom that the Government believes they do not need, with activists claiming that two-thirds of council houses affected by the policy are occupied with a person with a disability.
Some have argued that austerity measures in the UK are fueling a growing gap between the old and the young which seems likely to undermine inter-generational fairness. Some have even gone as far as to comment that this is deliberate, part of a wider campaign to residualise the welfare state so that it mainly rewards people for paid work, particularly through the contributory state pension, while undermining the social safety net for people of working age.
Feminist Fightback's "Cuts Are a Feminist Issue" featured in Issue 49 of Soundings Journal (published online in 2011 by the New Left Project) described the particular gendered impact of the austerity programme and "how the government's cutbacks in social provision are privatising work that is crucial to the sustenance of life". In 2012, the Fawcett Society published "The Impact of Austerity on Women" which, in particular, criticised the Treasury for not collecting "sufficient data and analysis of the impact of either the raft of individual measures that have been announced in key budget statements since June 2010, nor on the cumulative impact of these measures on women’s equality across the board". A briefing from the UK Women’s Budget Group on the cumulative distributional effects of cuts in public spending and tax changes on household income by gendered types over the period 2010-20 identified significant, and disproportionate, negative impacts of the government’s plans on women and low-income households (in which women predominate) despite claims that the burden would be shared equally.
Ring-fenced departments
Peter Dominiczak (political editor at The Daily Telegraph) wrote that because spending on the NHS and foreign aid is ring-fenced, "other Whitehall departments will face savage cuts to their budgets". However, some (such as Dr Louise Marshall in The Guardian) have questioned whether the National Health Service (NHS) really is exempt from austerity measures.