Austerity city: The real impact of 14 years of Conservative rule on Liverpool

For months the Liverpool Echo has been investigating and analysing the impact of 14 years of Conservative rule on the city of Liverpool.

With a general election just a fortnight away, we believe it is essential to understand what austerity policies have done to this city, its communities and its people.

When the Conservative-led coalition government came to power in 2010, they began an agenda of cuts that would devastate this city and have lasting effects on the health and life chances of its people in the years that followed.

In our special data investigation, we have looked closely at the real life impact of these policies across four key areas - council cuts, poverty, health and homelessness.

We have compiled our investigation into a stunning visual investigation that you can read in full by clicking the image below:

If the image link isn't working, please click here

The results of our analysis are stark and terrifying. They show a city that has had its public services torn apart, that has seen life expectancy go into retreat and where a growing number of children are growing up in poverty.

We have carried out extensive data analysis and research to see exactly how the decisions made in government have affected people’s lives in this city over the past 14 years of Conservative-led government. We’ve spoken to many of those at the forefront of the battle against austerity’s impacts and others who have found themselves at its sharpest end.

Council cuts

While the austerity agenda resulted in sweeping cuts across many government departments, there are few areas that have been as badly hit as local government.

In Britain today it is hard to remember a time when local councils were funded to the point that they could provide not only the statutory services that are legally required of them, but a host of other initiatives and programmes aimed at making people’s lives better.

Liverpool City Council’s core spending power has been cut by 35% in real terms since 2010/11, a loss of nearly £330m per year when adjusted for inflation. That is a real-terms cut of around £780 per person in the city.

Core spending power measures the resources available to fund local authority service delivery, including from Council Tax and locally-retained business rates. When looking just at funding from central government, Liverpool City Council bosses actually suggest that the city has lost a total of £500m per year since 2010.

The council’s current leader is Labour boss Liam Robinson. He was first elected to the city council in 2008 and remembers a very different time in the pre-austerity era.

“We had housing schemes where the government stepped in with kick-start funding to make sure those houses got built. It was a much more optimistic time as we had a government that saw Liverpool as an opportunity rather than a city with a certain view or a problem," he explains.

But speaking about the austerity agenda that was unleashed on the city and its council, he adds: "This gets me very, very angry. I believe this was part of a deliberate political project where money was moved to areas that vote Conservative and away from places that had traditionally voted Labour. That is unacceptable."

All of this has put the city council in a very difficult place. Around 3,000 jobs have been cut since 2010 and, as of December 2023, the local authority has around £580m in amassed debts. This means it can do a lot less to support its residents.

“If you went back a decade, councils might spend a third of their budget on social care, now we are spending 70% on just that. The system is broken," adds Cllr Robinson.

“We can now see the impact that has had over a decade and more,” he adds. “In Liverpool a third of our residents are living in poverty, 60% of our communities have some form of poverty, life expectancy is going backwards."

Poverty

“Child poverty kills kids, there is no doubt about that.”

These are the words of Professor David Taylor Robinson, a certified expert in child poverty. He is a professor of public health and policy at the University of Liverpool and a consultant in public health at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in the city.

And he is unequivocal when he speaks about the decisions taken by government over the past fourteen years and the impact they have had on the lives of people - and particularly children - in cities like Liverpool.

“A lot of our research has been on the impact of child poverty on children and their health,” he explains.

“It is one of the most deadly things for children. Our research has shown that rising child poverty between 2015 and 2017 had led to around an extra 500 deaths in England.”

He says that while things were improving in the years after Labour’s Child Poverty Act of 2010, which sought to eradicate the problem within a decade, things changed suddenly when the government changed.

“You see in the data that around 2010 things were improving and continued to improve because there was a lag effect. But then everything turned around,” explains the professor.

Working as a child health doctor, he says he has since seen child health simply “unravelling”.

“We have seen child health take a massive step back, with rising obesity, mental health, infant mortality, dentistry. Gradually public health has been reoriented into dealing with poverty.”

He recounts a number of heartbreaking stories.

“We’ve had parents talking about terminating wanted pregnancies because they can’t afford them, headteachers regularly buying uniforms for kids because they don’t have any.

“One kid was presenting at the hospital as diabetic and needed specific balanced food for his levels on insulin. His parents asked if they could also get food for his siblings because they were hungry. They were told no because it wasn’t hospital policy.”

He adds: “It turns out that when the food came, they shared it across all the kids and the child with diabetes ended up really sick and hospitalised for weeks.”

Official data shows that in Liverpool today, nearly one in every three children is living in relative poverty. That is 27,000 children and 32% of all the kids in the city. Like so many of the statistics in this report - this is a record high. To show the direction of travel, that number is up significantly from 2015, when it was lower than 16,000.

The current number also places Liverpool far higher than the national average for kids living in poverty, which is a still shameful 20%. The city council area ranks at 21 out of 361 local authority areas.

Of the 27,000 kids in poverty in Liverpool, more than half (56%) come from a working family. That particular number is up from 46% in 2015.

Health

As you would perhaps expect in a progressive and modernising society, life expectancy in Liverpool had been rising for many years. That was before the Tories came to power.

Since the Conservatives took charge, life expectancy in Liverpool has flatlined and in more recent years has actually fallen.

Girls born in the city between 2010 and 2012 could expect to live for an average of 80.11 years, while boys born then had a life expectancy of 75.95 years.

These figures have now fallen to 79.31 for girls and 75.32 for boys born between 2020 and 2022.

Liverpool has the fourth lowest life expectancy for girls and the fifth lowest for boys across England and Wales. The city is ranked third highest for its rate of under-75 mortality and fourth highest for avoidable deaths.

“We have seen a decline in people’s health in this city, most definitely,” explains Dr Kirsty McAvoy, who is a GP in Liverpool and is also the city’s clinical lead for health inequalities.

She agrees that a big trigger for this decline came about because of changes to the welfare system, ratified in the early years of the coalition government, which has resulted in more people struggling to afford to live healthily.

“That was a big turning point in primary care in terms of seeing people having their income cut or removed,” says Dr McAvoy. “There was an enormous impact then on physical but mostly mental health. There was a lot of anxiety that came with that whole process.

Of course if people's health is declining, this puts even more pressure on local services - such as the NHS, which now finds itself in a state of perpetual crisis.

A&E waits in Liverpool have generally been getting worse year-on-year since 2011, but have gotten particularly bad since the pandemic. In Jan-March 2024, only 55% of people attending type 1 A&Es at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust were admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours.

That’s down from 97% in Jan-March 2010, before Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust merged.

Meanwhile, a shocking 4,065 patients attending type 1 A&Es at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust were waiting more than 12 hours in Jan-March 2024 - up from 3,857 the year before, and just one patient the year before that.

Prior to 2023, the highest number of patients waiting for more than 12 hours in that three month period was 37 in 2017.

Homelessness

In the winter of 2023, Liverpool City Council declared that the city was in the midst of a housing and homelessness emergency.

The unusual and dramatic step was taken as the city faced a perfect storm of crises. More and more people were losing their homes due to soaring rents, rising mortgages and a huge spike in Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions - which the Conservative government has long-since promised to ban.

Record numbers were ending up sleeping on the streets, while hundreds of families found themselves stuck for weeks on end in emergency accommodation such as B&Bs and hotels.

This painful moment was the climax of 14 years of policies that have removed safety nets and allowed so many people in this city to fall into a position of destitution that is so hard to get out of.

David Carter is chief executive of the Whitechapel Centre, Liverpool’s main charity for homelessness and housing issues. He’s been doing the job for decades and things have never been worse.

“As an organisation, in 2010 we worked with 1,872 unique individuals across the year,” he recalls.

“Last year it was 4,362. So more than double. That puts it in perspective. Alongside that, people are staying with us for longer, because the solutions aren’t available.

“We have a brilliant rough sleeper outreach team but they are dealing with huge numbers,” he adds. “In September last year we had the highest-ever number of people sleeping rough in Liverpool in a single month. That number was 170 different people bedded down on one or more nights. The highest ever in the city.”

The official way of recording rough sleeping is imperfect and based on a snapshot on one night, but it still tells a story of how things have worsened since the austerity agenda began in 2010.

In that year, just three rough sleepers were counted in Liverpool on one specific night. By Autumn 2023 that number had risen by 11 times to reach 34.

“The stats paint a depressing picture,” says Mr Carter. “One that most people who live or work in Liverpool are familiar with.

“Needs have escalated, homelessness has escalated, poverty has escalated. The number of people that we are seeing sleeping rough has massively increased.”

But as he points out, rough sleeping is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the visible side of homelessness but actually represents a minority of those affected by homelessness.

Comparative figures on statutory homelessness only go back to 2018/19 (when the government changed the way it recorded these figures). In that time, the number of households recorded as homeless and owed a relief duty by Liverpool City Council has increased by a huge 39%, from 973 in 2018/19 to 1,348 in 2022/23.

One statistic that we can trace back to 2010 concerns the number of homeless households being housed in temporary accommodation by Liverpool City Council. That has risen from just 57 in 2010/11 to a terrifying 658 in 2022/23. An eleven fold increase, and another record high.

Mr Carter has worked in housing and homelessness for 33 years and said decades of underfunding and short-sighted policies have created this crisis. But he is clear that the austerity cuts of the past 14 years have massively exacerbated people’s problems.

“The numbers of people presenting to us have massively increased since 2010, rough sleeping has massively increased in that time,” he explains.

“Going back to 2010 when the numbers on the street were a lot lower, there was actually optimism. Optimism in terms of a belief that we could do things and we did have choices to offer people in difficulties. At the moment, when our outreach team meets people, they have their hands tied behind their backs without those options. It is so demoralising.”

He adds: “There is a systemic issue. We set people up to fail before they’ve even started and unless the system is changed and we enable people to succeed, then we’ve damned them before they have even started.

“Ultimately it is poverty that kills and the ability to get out of that situation is very difficult now.”

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