Broken Britain

After a decade of austerity that devastated public services, the UK is bracing... for more austerity

Satvir Kaur gets angry when she recalls her childhood in the 1990s in Southampton, on the south coast of England. “As an average inner-city kid who grew up on free school meals, I relied heavily on my local youth center,” the 38-year-old says. But today, after 12 years of austerity programs enforced by successive Conservative governments in London, “not only can the school not afford those activities for my nieces and nephews, but that youth center is run by a local charity, which is equally struggling.”

As head of Southampton’s Labour-led council, Kaur isn’t just watching her community suffer from the cuts. She now has to make them. The council must find savings of almost £1 million ($1.2 million) a week in 2023-24 to fill a shortfall in its £225 million budget amid soaring inflation and growing demand for services—what Kaur calls “austerity on steroids.” And it’s not just opposition-led places that are reeling. Two Conservative-run county councils nearby warned that they face bankruptcy because of “budget deficits over the next few years of a scale that has never been seen before.”

Public services in Britain are, in essence, crumbling. In recent years, English schools have needed some £11 billion in repairs that haven’t been made, according to a 2021 government report. There is an estimated £13 billion backlog of urgently needed roadwork. For hospitals, the figure is £10 billion.

Yet the new Conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—who also hails from Southampton—was scheduled to unveil a budget on Nov. 17 to plug a £55 billion fiscal hole via tax hikes and a raft of new cuts: a declaration that austerity is back.