Austerity

In the 2010 Emergency Budget the Coalition Government announced a major programme of public spending cuts totalling £83 billion. This was an inflation adjusted figure based on assumptions of the cost of the cuts in 2014; the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that this was the equivalent of a cut of £68 billion in 2010 (BBC 2010a). The cuts and changes made to welfare benefits over the course of the parliament were predicted to reduce spending on welfare by £19 billion a year by 2014/15 (Beatty and Fothergill 2013). Cuts to departmental budgets were announced in the spending review totalling an average of 19% per department (BBC 2010b). Local Government was particularly badly hit. Annual cuts to local Government Budgets meant that by 2015 local government faced a 40% cut from 2010 funding (LGA 2014).

These cuts were arguably designed not only to cut the deficit but in order to meet a wider ambition to shrink the size of the state (Grimshaw and Rubery 2012, Taylor Gooby and Stoker 2012). This ambition to shrink the state had been set out in the Coalition’s Programme for Government (see above); the Emergency Budget demonstrated that the commitments set out in the Programme were not simply rhetorical but would be central to the Government’s work for the next five years. Some of the changes were a continuation of cuts already started under the previous Government. On welfare for example the Labour Government had started a process of welfare reforms aimed at ‘reducing dependency’ getting people back to work and reducing welfare spending (Finn 2005). However the Coalition’s changes went far ‘further and faster’ (Hamnet 2014).Taylor-Gooby and Stoker’s analysis of the new Government’s programme concluded that the ‘unprecedented’ reduction in the size and role of the state represented a plan to take the country in a new direction ‘rolling back the state to a level of intervention below that of the United States’ (Taylor- Gooby and Stoker 2012).

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These cuts and reforms changed the context in which the PSED was implemented in a number of ways. Many commentators warned that cuts to public spending would have the result of increasing inequality (Taylor Gooby 2012, Taylor Gooby and Stoker 2012) and gender inequality in particular (Annesley and Himmelweit 2010, Stephenson and Harrison 2011, Conley, Kerfoot and Thornley 2011). A major assessment of the cumulative impact of cuts to services and benefits for the EHRC (Reed and Portes 2014) demonstrated that these warnings were justified. The cumulative impact of cuts to benefits, tax credits and changes to direct and indirect taxation hit the poorest hardest with those in the bottom income decile losing the most (over 7% of their net income). Within all these income groups, women lost more than men and Asian and Black households lost more than white households. Households with no disabled person lost least, followed by households with a

disabled adult and then household with a disabled child. Households containing both a disabled adult and a disabled child lost the most losing 5.5% of their income (Reed and Portes 2014 p 47).

Cuts to spending on services were similarly most likely to affect the poorest households with households in the lowest income decile losing services worth

£1,500 a year compared to houses in the highest decile which lost an average of £750 a year (p84). When benefits, tax credits and changes to direct and indirect taxation were combined the two hardest hit groups of households were lone parents (who lost the equivalent of over 14% of their income) and lone pensioners (who lost over 10%). (Reed and Portes 2014 p88). Women form the majority of both these groups. Black and Asian households lost more than white households (p89) as did

households containing a disabled person compared to those which did not contain a disabled person (p91). These findings have been mirrored by numerous studies which have shown that spending cuts have disproportionately affected the poorest parts of the country (Beatty and Fothergill 2013), minority ethnic groups

(Runnymede Trust et al 2011), disabled people (Harris 2014), children (Ridge 2013) and women (Sandhu, Stephenson and Harrison 2013, Annesley and Gains 2015). Action by public bodies to promote equality would therefore take place against a background of increasing inequality.

This rise in inequality is exacerbated by the language used by Government ministers to describe the people who are worst affected by the cuts. For while austerity was

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initially justified in terms of responsibility (dealing with the deficit) and freedom (from interference by an over large state) it soon also became linked to the third of the Coalition’s three priorities ‘fairness’. The claim that it is ‘not fair’ if someone claiming benefits is better off than someone in paid work was started under the previous Labour Government. Announcing a cap housing benefit in 2010 Yvette Cooper, then Minister of Housing stated that ‘it isn’t fair for the taxpayer to fund a very small minority of people to live in expensive houses which hard-working families could never afford (Parliament March 2010). However as with the cuts themselves the Coalition’s use of the discourse of fairness to justify cuts went far further. George Osborne’s speech to the 2012 Conservative Party Conference specifically justified cuts to welfare benefits in terms of fairness, placing the Government as the champion of fairness on the side of the ‘hard working’, the ‘striver’ who is losing out to the ‘scrounger’ or ‘skiver’ on benefits:

Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits? (Channel 4 2012).

Here receipt of benefits has moved from the problems caused by people being abandoned to a life on benefits, rather than supported into work, to benefits as a lifestyle choice – the use of the phrase ‘sleeping off’ with its association with alcohol (sleeping off a hangover), suggests that those on benefits not only don’t have to get up for work in the morning but are likely to be spending their money on the wrong things. This language of scroungers and strivers creates a stigma for those claiming benefits, which can lead to discriminatory treatment (Sandhu, Stephenson and Harrison 2013). Both the Church of England and Disability Charities have raised concerns that the stigmatisation of benefits by both politicians and sections of the media have led to increased discrimination and harassment against poor and disabled people in particular (Express 2012, Church Times 2013). If this rhetoric creates negative public attitudes against certain equality groups it may make work to

promote equality harder to justify, particularly at a time when services are being cut. In addition to the impact of the cuts on equality and attitudes to certain groups, cuts to budgets of public sector organisations might be expected to reduce the resources available for work on equality (Conley and Page 2010). This was certainly seen at a

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national level where the Government Equalities Office faced a budget cut of 38%, double the average across all departments. This was met by a reduction of staff in the GEO, a significant cut to the budget of the EHRC and the closure of the Women’s National Commission which had acted as the voice of the women’s voluntary sector in Government for over forty years (Annesley and Gains 2014). The impact on equality work within local authorities is considered in subsequent chapters. A further likely impact of austerity has been raised by the work of Annesley and Gains (2013) who have shown that adverse economic conditions can make it harder to get equality on the agenda of public bodies. Smaller equality teams may lack the power to push for equality policies, or there may not be sufficient funding to meet the costs involved in pro-equality policies. In local government in particular the impact of 40% cuts to budgets may lead to a focus on re-structuring services that pushes equality down the list of priorities. Finally with a shrinking state the areas where public bodies have the power to act on equality are also reduced; with services contracted out to private or voluntary sector organisations or cut altogether the potential for consideration of equality to be mainstreamed into the delivery of these services is diminished.