Comment by jdietrich

>What has actually changed?

The value of grants paid from central government to local government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest local authorities received most of their funding from central government; today, they're dependent on council tax and business rates for the vast majority of their income. During that time, demand for social care has vastly increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources of local authorities.

The result of those cuts have been drastic for people living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres, social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes, parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt acutely by the people who rely on those services.

The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they live in local authorities that were never particularly reliant on central government funding and because they never really relied on council services anyway. For the very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation for months or years because there's no social housing available, being denied support for a disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-tipping.

https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_...

https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...