When politicians and their advisers decide, typically in the name of ‘economic solvency’, to cut back significantly the social supports to help those in need to get them through life’s ups and downs, those denied this support pay a price that can be measured in rising poverty, increased health inequality and ultimately in a rise in premature deaths.
Now for the first time we can look back to the first half of the nineteenth century, just as the Chartist movement was gaining strength, and assess the mortality penalty paid by the poor when the first historic nationwide austerity programme was launched by the UK national government in 1834. Before the savage cuts were imposed, since 1812 local communities had on average been transferring annually 2% of GDP in welfare relief to those in hardship (at that time an unusually high amount, reflecting the needs of a society in the throws of the industrial revolution). Then, between 1834 and 1838 transfer payments to the poorest half of the population were reduced by fully 47%; and then held down at that lower level for several decades.
The results are shocking. Examining 307 Poor Law Unions, we studied the effects of this programme of austerity on 30% of the most rural part of the population of England and Wales. Even in these rural districts (where living conditions were supposedly healthier than in towns) children under age 10 suffered a highly significant 12.5% rise in annual mortality . These annual losses of life continued over the next decades while the reduction in social support was maintained. This meant that the cuts annually caused an estimated 19,000 additional child deaths in these 307 Unions where it is possible to measure the effect. This impact was not measured at the time and so not known to contemporaries, who focused more on the very high death rates in the crowded, insanitary cities like Manchester and Liverpool, where there can be little doubt the post-1834 welfare cuts on this scale must also have impacted the poor.
What is perhaps even more shocking to modern eyes is that this result was predictable to those implementing the cuts to welfare. Due to the Malthus-influenced thinking of the governing class, the poor were stigmatised as inherently lazy, undisciplined and breeding too many children that they could not support. This thinking explains why the cuts to the Poor Law specifically targeted reducing allowances for large families.
Does this sound familiar? The fourteen years of austerity under the Conservative government (2010-2024) saw a deliberate push to reduce welfare payments for working people in the false belief that these cuts were needed to pay for the 2008 financial crash – which working people did not cause. Child poverty rates have risen from 30% in 2010 to 33% in 2024 (reversing a previous decline from 33% to 27% 1997-2010). From 2013 the infamous 6-week waiting period for Universal Credit payments was introduced (only reduced to 5 weeks in 2018 after years of protest that it tipped the poor into the hands of loan sharks). Housing benefit was increasingly restricted so that only the very cheapest and often unfit housing was available to benefit recipients, while from 2016 all working age benefits were frozen (no uprating for inflation) until 2020.
There was a similar, almost Malthusian moralistic undertone to the cuts since 2010. The introduction in 2013 of a ‘benefit cap’ to limit the total amount that any one family could claim, along with the now-notorious two-child limit on all children born after April 2017, were of course both targeted at larger families. It was an explicit signal from the government that people who had more children than they could afford should not be receiving payments beyond the second child. This, more than anything, has been identified as the leading reason why child poverty will continue to rise unless the policy is radically revised. By April 2020, 250,000 households were being denied benefits for a third or subsequent child and by 2025 this had risen to 469,000.
Just as in 1834, part of the reason Conservative governments of 2010-24 have not yet been held responsible for the health impacts of the cuts they imposed is that it takes time for these to be assessed and made known. Meanwhile leading paediatric experts have raised alarm bells at shocking increases in malnourished children, teachers are highlighting problems with hungry children unable to learn effectively, and there is even some suggestion that the abortion rate for third or subsequent pregnancies may have risen among those subject to this policy. Alongside this, appalling housing conditions, and in particular damp and mould that landlords, including social landlords, do not deal with effectively, has been directly linked by coroners to deaths of small children.
It is not only poverty that is being driven by the legacy of austerity. There was a severe cut in health spending in relation to population need. Real, inflation-adjusted annual spending, allowing also for the ageing of the population, fell each year by 0.05% for the entire decade, including the pandemic, 2010-21. The overall result is that the rise in poor living conditions has coincided with a stalling of the previous long-term steady rise in national life expectancy seen in every decade since the 1870s. Alarmingly, there has also been an actual fall in life expectancy for females living in the most deprived districts. The drivers of this can be seen all around in the huge increase in food banks supporting those who can no longer survive on insufficient levels of benefits and in the rising levels of fuel poverty, causing many families to choose between ‘heating and eating’, and widespread reports of parents going without food to ensure that their children can eat.
What this historic study confirms is that when ideologists, advisers and politicians choose to ‘balance the books’ by significantly reducing welfare provision, rather than by government borrowing or by raising wealth or income taxes, they may like to think of this as a technical economic matter but they are imposing penalties on the most vulnerable, who suffer in the form of hunger and even premature death.
