̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - austerity

Austerity cuts ‘twice as deep’ in England as rest of Britain

fpjl2 — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 23:31:55 +0000

A “fine-grained” analysis of local authority budgets across Britain since 2010 has found that the average reduction in service spending by councils was almost 24% in England compared to just 12% in Wales and 11.5% in Scotland.

While some areas – Glasgow, for example – experienced significant service loss, the new study suggests that devolved powers have allowed Scottish and Welsh governments to mitigate the harshest local cuts experienced in parts of England.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers found that, across Britain, the most severe cuts to local service spending between 2010 and 2017 were generally associated with areas of “multiple deprivation”.

This pattern is clearest in England, where all 46 councils that cut spending by 30% or more are located. These local authorities tend to be more reliant on central government, with lower property values and fewer additional funding sources, as well as less ability to generate revenue through taxes.

̽��ֱ��north was hit with the deepest cuts to local spending, closely followed by parts of London. ̽��ֱ��ten worst affected councils include Salford, South Tyneside and Wigan, as well as the London boroughs of Camden and Hammersmith and Fulham. Westminster council had a drop in service spending of 46% – the most significant in the UK.

̽��ֱ��research also shows a large swathe of southern England, primarily around the ‘home counties’, with low levels of reliance on central government and only relatively minor local service cuts. Northern Ireland was excluded from the study due to limited data.

̽��ֱ��authors of the new paper, published today in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, say the findings demonstrate how austerity has been pushed down to a local level, “intensifying territorial injustice” between areas.

They argue that initiatives claimed by government to ameliorate austerity, such as local retention of business taxes, will only fuel unfair competition and inequality between regions – as local authorities turn to “beggar thy neighbor” policies in efforts to boost tax bases and buffer against austerity.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea that austerity has hit all areas equally is nonsense,” said geographer Dr Mia Gray, who conducted the research with her Cambridge colleague Dr Anna Barford.

“Local councils rely to varying degrees on the central government, and we have found a clear relationship between grant dependence and cuts in service spending.

“ ̽��ֱ��average cuts to local services have been twice as deep in England compared to Scotland and Wales. Cities have suffered the most, particularly in the old industrial centres of the north but also much of London,” said Gray.

“Wealthier areas can generate revenues from business tax, while others sell off buildings such as former back offices to plug gaping holes in council budgets.

“ ̽��ֱ��councils in greatest need have the weakest local economies. Many areas with populations that are ageing or struggling to find employment have very little in the way of a public safety net.

“ ̽��ֱ��government needs to decide whether it is content for more local authorities to essentially go bust, in the way we have already seen in Northamptonshire this year,” she said.

Local authorities with largest spending drop	Change in service spending 2010-2017
Westminster	-46%
Salford	-45%
South Tyneside	-44%
Slough	-44%
Wigan	-43%
Oldham	-42%
Gateshead	-41%
Camden	-39%
Hammersmith & Fulham	-38%
Kensington & Chelsea	-38%

̽��ֱ��latest study used data from the Institute of Fiscal Studies to conduct a spatial analysis of Britain’s local authority funding system.

Gray and Barford mapped the levels of central grant dependence across England’s councils, and the percentage fall of service spend by local authorities across Scotland, Wales and England between financial years 2009/2010 and 2016/2017.

Some of the local services hit hardest across the country include highways and transport, culture, adult social care, children and young people’s services, and environmental services.

̽��ֱ��part of central government formerly known as the Department of Communities and Local Government experienced a dramatic overall budget cut of 53% between 2010 and 2016.

As budget decisions were hit at a local level, “mandatory” council services – those considered vital – were funded at the expense of “discretionary” services. However, the researchers found these boundaries to be blurry.

“Taking care of ‘at risk’ children is a mandatory concern. However, youth centres and outreach services are considered unessential and have been cut to the bone. Yet these are services that help prevent children becoming ‘at risk’ in the first place,” said Gray.

“There is a narrative at national and local levels that the hands of politicians are tied, but many of these funding decisions are highly political. Public finance is politics hidden in accounting columns.”

Gray points out that once local councils “go bust” and Section 114 notices are issued, as with Northamptonshire Council, administrators are sent in who then take financial decisions that supersede any democratic process.

̽��ֱ��research has also contributed to the development of a new play from the Menagerie Theatre Company, in which audience members help guide characters through situations taken from the lives of those in austerity-hit Britain. ̽��ֱ��play opens tonight in Oxford, and will be performed in community venues across the country during October and November.

Gray added: “Ever since vast sums of public money were used to bail out the banks a decade ago, the British people have been told that there is no other choice but austerity imposed at a fierce and relentless rate.”

“We are now seeing austerity policies turn into a downward spiral of disinvestment in certain people and places. Local councils in some communities are shrunk to the most basic of services. This could affect the life chances of entire generations born in the wrong part of the country.”

Research finds significant inequalities in cuts to council services across the country, with deprived areas in the north of England and London seeing the biggest drops in local authority spending since 2010.

Public finance is politics hidden in accounting columns

Mia Gray

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Estate sunset

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Staff-prisoner relationships are key to managing suicide risk in prison, say researchers

fpjl2 — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 14:41:00 +0000

On 1 July 2015, the Government published the Labour peer Lord Toby Harris’ final report of the Independent Review into self-inflicted deaths in custody of 18-24 year olds, which was commissioned to make recommendations on actions that need to be taken to reduce the risk of future deaths in custody.

A team from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Law and Prison Research Centre (PRC), in partnership with RAND Europe, was commissioned by the Harris Review to undertake new research on the experience, knowledge and views of prison staff about the nature of suicide risk and its identification and management. Researchers conducted around 50 interviews and focus groups, and observed prisoner assessments across five prisons in England and Wales, including both private and public establishments.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that many prison staff use ‘jailcraft’ — the knowledge and expertise gained through their own experience — to identify and manage at risk prisoners, but staff felt that their capacity to build and exercise this expertise has been adversely affected by a lack of time and budget, and a reliance on blanket risk management procedures.

While some staff held fatalistic views of individual prisoners (‘those who really want to do it will do it anyway’), researchers say that staff who understood the impacts of prison environments, and attempted to proactively ameliorate those impacts upon prisoners, through their relationships with prisoners and practices, were more likely to be effective in preventing deaths.

Such staff placed individual prisoner care at the heart of their work. They used initiative by, for example, ‘creating’ jobs to occupy prisoners’ minds, such as additional cleaning or painting on the wing, or offering in cell ‘distraction packs’ that included Sudoku puzzles or crosswords.

“While some prison staff felt that suicide attempts could be described as acts of manipulation, many saw it as a cry of pain. ̽��ֱ��prison officers who recognised the complex interaction between prisoners’ imported vulnerabilities — such as addiction or illiteracy — and their environment and situations, felt more empowered to gauge the risks of self-harm or suicide and intervene to prevent situations from escalating,” said the PRC’s Dr Amy Ludlow, who led the research.

̽��ֱ��team say their findings highlight the importance of “high-quality relationships between prisoners and staff for identifying and managing suicide risks in an increasingly austere prison environment”.

However, many of the staff interviewed for the research felt that budget-reduction policies, including ‘Benchmarking’ and ‘New Ways of Working’, had adversely affected their capacity and expertise to manage suicide risk proactively, rather than reactively. Many staff expressed frustration at having too little time for personalised, integrated care.

Many of the study’s interviewees described staff losses from early redundancy packages being compounded by high staff sickness — often, they reported, because of work-related stress. In some prisons, researchers observed senior managers undertaking prison officer work such as serving meals to make up for the short fall.

One prison manager told researchers: “Benchmarking has put us between the devil and the deep blue sea. We’ve had to implement it even though we know it’s damaging the prison”.

Staff reported that there were currently too few staff on prison wings, and those staff present were often less effective than they could be because of inconsistent staff deployment, the use of agency staff, low morale and infrequent or inadequate training.

Many staff also reported that social and educational activities in prisons had been reduced as a result of budget cuts, with whole wings of prisoners routinely ‘banged up’ (confined to their cells) for almost all of the day.

“We know from this and other studies that there are a number of protective factors related to the prison environment that impact on the likelihood of suicide," said the PRC’s Professor Alison Liebling.

“Part of this story is how well a prison responds to prisoners’ needs during acute periods of distress. But it is also important that a prison provides an environment where prisoners have meaningful activities and human contact, both for prisoners who are and those who aren’t seen as at enhanced risk of self-harm,” she said.

Researchers found the Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork (ACCT) process that dominates the ways in which prisoners at risk are identified and managed — and was credited with contributing to the decline in suicide that began in the mid-2000s — was now often being approached as a ‘tick box’ exercise because staff felt that they ‘haven’t got time to deal with [risk] any other way’.

Staff described an over-reliance on ACCTs, with the result that support was not focused on prisoners most in need of it. Many cited a fear of blame for deaths in explaining their ‘defensive’ use of ACCT. Staff described feeling unfairly blamed when things go wrong, and unrecognised for their successes in preventing deaths by a system that does not understand the resource constraints within which prison work is carried out.

̽��ֱ��research also found that adequate support for staff in preparing for inquests was important in securing positive oriented learning experiences from deaths in custody. While some staff reported evidence of positive change to practice following inquests, some staff, particularly managers, expressed frustration that some ‘pretty straightforward lessons’ were not learned by all staff from inquests.

Some staff and managers were equally of the view that ‘self-inflicted deaths (SID) could act as catalysts for reflection and changes to practice that make SID prevention more effective’, and staff reported looking for an achievable model of effective practice. One member of prison staff reported that “listening to colleague’s stories and experiences would help you grow. Retrospective learning from such incidents would be great. We do too little of it now — we’re always in defensive mode”.

̽��ֱ��team’s findings have helped inform some of the Harris Review’s 108 recommendations about how more deaths in prisons can be prevented: through improved training for staff; recognition of the importance of — and investment in — caring, personalised and respectful staff-prisoner relationships; better information flows between relevant agencies; and a focus on lesson learning following all incidents of self-harm and suicide.

“ ̽��ֱ��Harris Review has raised important questions that demand the attention of policymakers,” said Ludlow.

“My hope is that our study will be a catalyst for further dialogue about suicide prevention, which will complement the Review’s thorough work. There are some dedicated prison staff whose knowledge and experience should inform next steps, as should the insights of the many excellent volunteer prisoner Listeners who support fellow prisoners at times of crisis. That sustained reductions in the rate of suicides in prison were achieved post 2005 suggest that systematic efforts to prevent them can work, given the right organisational context,” she said.

Ludlow points out that the Harris Review states that, by and large, the policies that National Offender Management Services promulgates through Prison Service Instructions are sound and, if implemented, would deliver good practice.

“While suicide risk is intense, multifaceted and dynamic, the protective potential impact of staff-prisoner relationships and the prison environment should give us hope that more deaths can be prevented given adequate resource and leadership, and genuine political commitment to some of the welcome fundamental critiques raised by the Harris Review about the size of our prison population, and experiences of imprisonment that too frequently inadequately support prisoners in their journeys towards non-offending lives,” Ludlow said.

̽��ֱ��full findings of this study are now available online.

̽��ֱ��research team will host a roundtable event to discuss this and related research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge on 8 September 2015. For more information about the event, contact Dr Amy Ludlow.

In the wake of a recent increase in prisoner suicide, new research commissioned by the Harris Review on the views and experiences of prison staff suggests that identifying and managing vulnerable prisoners requires the building of staff-prisoner relationships, ‘knowing the prisoners and understanding what makes them tick’. However, prison staff say that this has been adversely affected by the need to deliver budgetary savings.

̽��ֱ��protective potential impact of staff-prisoner relationships and the prison environment should give us hope that more deaths can be prevented given adequate resource and leadership

Amy Ludlow

ESRC Prison Research Centre film

Staff who understood the impacts of prison environments, and attempted to proactively ameliorate those impacts upon prisoners, were more likely to be effective in preventing deaths.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Austerity Britain: it's déjà vu all over again

amb206 — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 09:46:22 +0000

In May 2010, Britain’s first coalition government since the Second World War announced that its primary objective was to reduce the deficit, then running at 11 per cent as the public sector spent £156 billion more than it raised in taxes. Six weeks later, the Chancellor, George Osborne, increased the spending cuts and tax hikes inherited from the Labour Government to £113 billion over five years, with the largest single adjustment to fall on welfare recipients. ̽��ֱ��Chancellor aimed to balance the budget by 2016, by which time public sector debt would be declining as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). He also plans to reduce the public sector’s share of the economy from 48 per cent to 39.5 per cent.

While Osborne is keen to stress the unique nature of the current crisis, we have been here before – not once but several times. In 1922, a previous Conservative-Liberal coalition cut public spending by 9 per cent, with most of the reduction falling within the first year. In this post-war era, pressure came from the ‘squeezed middle’ as millions of households that had begun paying income tax during the First World War latched on to a Daily Mail campaign to root out ‘waste’ in the public sector. Before the war, the basic rate of income tax was 8 per cent. In 1922 it was still at its wartime high of 30 per cent as the Government built ‘homes for heroes’ and widened education provision. ̽��ֱ��Geddes Committee, appointed by the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, recommended that spending be cut by 10 per cent, a third to come from reduced naval expenditure, with education taking the second largest cut.

These cuts, although watered down by Cabinet, allowed the Chancellor, Sir Robert Horne, to achieve his primary aim of reducing income tax, from 30 per cent to 25 per cent. They also contributed to a miserable decade for the British economy. While America enjoyed the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and a long stock market boom that finally broke with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Britain endured a General Strike as workers protested against wage cuts, and high unemployment, particularly in ‘Outer Britain’ as the old industries of the industrial revolution (cotton, coal and iron) suffered depressed demand.

With the global depression lowering tax revenue and increasing unemployment after the Wall Street crash, the government was in deficit by 1931. ̽��ֱ��economic orthodoxy of the day meant that the budget simply had to balance if the pound were to remain on the Gold Standard. ̽��ֱ��May Committee, appointed to identify savings, estimated that the shortfall for 1931 would be 5 per cent of public spending, rising to 9 per cent in 1932. ̽��ֱ��Committee decided that the burden of adjustment should fall on the unemployed. While unemployment benefit had not changed since 1928, the cost of living had fallen. ̽��ֱ��Chancellor was advised to cut benefits by 20 per cent, taking them just below 1928 levels in real terms. Once again, education was to be the second major source of savings.

̽��ֱ��minority Labour Government was unable to agree on the cuts and collapsed in August 1931. ̽��ֱ��successor National Government (another Conservative-dominated coalition) introduced an emergency Budget in September which eliminated the deficit, now estimated at 12 per cent of public spending, through a combination of tax increases, spending cuts, and debt rescheduling. ̽��ֱ��largest saving came from unemployment benefit, where a 10 per cent cut was combined with increased insurance contributions. ̽��ֱ��Government also announced public sector wage cuts. These fell particularly onerously on junior naval personnel, who were asked to take a 25 per cent wage cut. When they read about this in the newspapers, part of the British fleet mutinied. As news of the mutiny spread, the pound came under speculative attack, forcing Britain off the Gold Standard. So, while the 1931 cuts failed in their primary objective of keeping the pound on the Gold Standard, coming off gold allowed the authorities to direct their attention to the domestic economy, laying the foundations for the 1930s recovery with looser monetary policy.

̽��ֱ��defining image of the 1930s is the Jarrow March, as unemployed workers walked from the North East to London in protest at their plight. But for those who held on to their jobs, it was a relatively good decade as strong economic growth raised living standards.

̽��ֱ��1930s recovery was sustained by rearmament and spending on the Second World War. After adjusting to a peacetime footing in the late 1940s, Britain enjoyed a long post-war boom, which came to an abrupt end with the 1973 oil shock. While most industrial nations reduced spending to offset the increased cost of oil imports, the British decided to ‘tunnel through’ to North Sea oil production, due to come on stream within five years. This meant higher borrowing. In 1975, the government deficit was over 10 per cent. There was also a balance of payments deficit to finance. With a huge loan from the leading central banks falling due in December 1976, and no foreign currency reserves to repay it, the Government had little alternative but to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for assistance. Having already granted two separate loans to Britain in late 1975, and concerned that public borrowing was ‘crowding out’ private enterprise, the Fund had left the Chancellor, Denis Healey, in no doubt that further assistance would be conditional on his lowering the deficit.

Despite a round of cuts in July 1976, confidence remained low and, with sterling in freefall, Britain announced its eleventh visit to the IMF. After several weeks of tense negotiations, Healey agreed to limit the deficit to £8.7 billion in 1977 and £8.6 billion in 1978 (still more than 10 per cent of public spending), contingent upon the economy growing by 3.5 per cent. This meant a further 3 per cent of cuts, spread over two years and across several departments, with defence and capital expenditure on roads, schools and housing bearing the brunt. In the event, the confidence effect of the IMF’s ‘good housekeeping seal of approval’, combined with the measures already taken, saw the British economy achieve robust growth in 1977 and 1978.

What do these episodes tell us about the situation today? ̽��ֱ��table shows that the current austerity outweighs all previous episodes as a percentage of GDP. Apart from 1922, when spending cuts were used to finance lower taxes, the burden of adjustment falls more heavily on spending than taxation.

	1922	1931	1976	2010
Fiscal consolidation/GDP	3%	4%	1%	6%
Budget deficit	3%	12%	7%	10%
Total public debt/GDP	171%	171%	45%	60%
Debt servicing cost/GDP	9%	9%	4%	2%
Spending cuts/tax rises	3:-1	7:6	2:1	3:1

̽��ֱ��size of the current task most closely resembles that of 1931, when the cuts fell principally on the unemployed. Today, Osborne deploys the same argument: that benefit claimants have done better out of cost-of-living adjustments than the working population. However, the differences are stark. With huge war loans to service in 1922 and 1931, interest payments took up a greater proportion of public spending. By contrast, servicing the debt presents few difficulties today. As the graph shows, the current level of public debt is modest by historical standards. Indeed, with ten-year Government bonds currently paying around 2 per cent, demand for UK debt appears to be outstripping supply. ̽��ֱ��government currently spends 3 per cent of GDP on servicing the debt, versus a historical average of nearly 5 per cent.

UK public debt/GDP since the Industrial Revolution

In 1931 the burden was split almost equally between spending cuts and higher taxes. By contrast, Osborne wants spending cuts to take 77 per cent of the adjustment, citing academic work suggesting that cuts are less damaging to growth than tax rises. This is critical because it is growth that will ultimately decide the outcome. As Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times recently pointed out “if we have a normal economic recovery the red ink will diminish remarkably quickly. It we don’t, it won’t”. Twenty-five years of strong growth after the Second World War reduced public debt from 238 per cent to 50 per cent of GDP. Growth, not cuts, reduced a similar deficit in 1977-78 when the second year of cuts was contingent upon robust economic expansion.

Currently, the auspices are not good. ̽��ֱ��Office for Budget Responsibility now believes that the economy shrank in 2012, after predicting 2.8 per cent growth in June 2010. It has also downgraded its growth estimates to 2015, forcing the Chancellor to postpone balancing the budget until after the next General Election, by which time, on current estimates, public sector debt will be 80 per cent, 20 points higher than when the Coalition Government took office.

Reflecting upon the failure of monetarism in the early 1980s, Nigel Lawson quotes Robert Burns, ‘ ̽��ֱ��best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft agley’. By the time he comes to write his memoirs, George Osborne may well share these sentiments.

Duncan Needham worked as a bond trader at JP Morgan and a fund manager at Cairn Capital before coming to Cambridge to take a PhD. His research focuses on UK economic policy from the 1960s to the 1980s.

̽��ֱ��last 100 years have seen several governments introduce austerity measures to try to balance the books. Duncan Needham, a Phd candidate in the Centre for Financial History, compares past and present, concluding that current public spending cuts are inhibiting the growth we need.

̽��ֱ��size of the current task most closely resembles that of 1931, when the cuts fell principally on the unemployed.

Duncan Needham, Centre for Financial History

Timojazz, flickr Creative Commons

̽��ֱ��Jarrow March symbolises austerity in the 1930s

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