Councils are robbed of any former buoyancy that enabled them to support everything from libraries to drop-in centres, to provisions for people with wellbeing issues – leaving behind a blighted social landscape; what you might call the generosity and kindness that a town or borough might have once harboured, gone.
And so we come to our present travails, with local authorities finding it increasingly difficult to provide for anyone in need. And because of Covid and the Oxford/Eton-inspired austerity that came before it, local government has a bigger hit than ever to its bottom line. And many have and will fall into deficit.
The Labour government cannot deliver on what it promised within the constraints placed on it by the former government. Therefore it is intent on carrying on with the hit to those in poverty because that is their biggest bill. That is what costs government most; by my reckoning the damage and collateral damage created by poverty in our society amounts to 40% of the government’s takings.
There is little wriggle room according to what government is saying: that unless we become a more prosperous nation, we are not able to underwrite the costs of social collapse in the lives of the many. With upwards of nine million people ‘economically inactive’, the weight upon the exchequer is enormous.
But where is the evidence that government is putting the ending of poverty uppermost in its mind? Where is the deep questioning that looks at the farcical attempts at coping with poverty over the last 24 years, since the beginning of this millennium? Why is it that all we have done with our social programmes and the spend of our social budget is to grow poverty and not reduce it, or end it? Poverty is the biggest growth industry in the UK today.
Yet the same old tools are applied to the problems that increase rather than reduce.
One thing that has been obvious up until now is that there has not been a ‘collaterally aware cost cutting’ kind of thinking. That is, “If I cut here, what does it do to those most in need?” If this government – who we hope will settle down sometime soon and get on with showing some thoughtfulness to ridding us of poverty – was to question the asinine structure of its spending then we might begin a renaissance of some kind. A broadening of the social base of our communities by looking at the damage and not just the savings.
A few weeks ago, we had a wonderful Big Issue Roadshow in Newcastle. At a very well attended debate we spoke about what needs to be done to bring ‘social happiness and hope’ back to the North East. It was a positive event and I was pleased to participate, with the last question summing up the mission that needs to be attended to: How do we ensure that in 10 years’ time life is better for all in the North East, and not just for some?
The general feeling was that it could not be ‘more of the same’. That to bring change in an area that was blighted decades ago by the closing of mines, factories, heavy engineering and steel, something different needs to be done. Else we will still be talking about the increase in food banks, in temporary, ad hoc, short term, making do-isms galore. In homelessness and poverty of body, mind and spirit.
It can only be done if the issue of poverty becomes central to this government; and there is a realisation that its current scattergun attempts to solving it prolong and deepen the chasm between the haves and the have nots.
John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.
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