Planned spending cuts for 2015-16 are likely to return to the same areas to squeeze them further
New research has shown yet again that it is the poor who are suffering most from this government’s cuts.
An Election Briefing Note published today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies describes how between 2009-10 and 2014-14, local authority spending per person was cut by 23.4 per cent in real terms. In general, the IFS finds, more deprived areas and those with faster population growth have seen the biggest cuts.
What is more, further cuts planned for 2015-16 will affect the same local authorities that have already been cut, meaning that the same people are being affected over and over again.
The IFS find that cuts to net service spending over this parliament have tended to be larger in areas that were ‘initially more reliant on central government grants to fund spending’; areas that are deemed to have a high level of spending need relative to their local revenue-raising capacity, ie. the most deprived.
David Innes, a Research Economist at IFS and one of the authors of the report, said of the findings:
“English councils – like many government departments in Whitehall – have experienced sharp cuts to their spending power over the last five years. But the size of the cuts has varied a lot across England.
“On the whole, it is more deprived areas, those with lower local revenue-raising capacity, and those that have seen the fastest population growth that have seen the largest cuts to spending per person. Further cuts are likely to come in the next parliament and they could well be focused on many of the same local authorities if the current mechanism for allocating funds is retained.”
London boroughs have seen the largest average spending cuts per person, with an average of 31.4 per cent. In the North East, spending per person was cut by 26.5 per cent, and 25.7 per cent in the North West.
By 2014-15, spending cuts in London had been nearly twice as deep as those in the South East. In the future, the IFS predicts, areas like this with more rapid population growth will find it harder to maintain a steady level of spending per person.
Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
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16 Responses to “IFS finds that the most deprived areas have seen the deepest cuts”
Norfolk29
Have you ever tried “Optimism”. I know it’s difficult, but why not try. We should try to get a better voting system, but, in the meantime, we should try to get everyone to vote. Even if it’s only to annoy the likes of Russell Grant.
Leon Wolfeson
Where it’s appropriate.
Trying to get people to spoil their vote – which is the only applicable option for many – en-mass is not exactly inspiring. I’ll do it, sure, but unless and until we have a voting system which gives people (especially those on the left) a choice closer to what they actually want…
Norfolk29
This is not Optimism. However, just think what a voting system that reflected what people voted for would have given us. Just imagine over 150 LibDems in the House of Commons and the damage they would have done. Enough to make me lose more sleep than I can afford. The Belgium’s have 92 parties, each with one MP so it takes over a year to form a government.
This country is not in a desperate crisis as demonstrated by the US which is a further 10 years ahead of us down this road and is still the greatest industrial country in the world. I agree that it is unlikely that the British people would put up with a Tory Party so like the Republican/Austerity/Tea Party that the American people appear to like, but we shall see on the 8th May.
Leon Wolfeson
With PR as a voting system, there would be a far wider set of options, including some very different ones. I want the German system, not the Belgium one, too – but you obviously haven’t done the basic research there, because there are certainly not 92×1 MP parties – there’s 13 parties and 150 seats.
You’re raising chimeras.
And we haven’t followed America’s example of recovery, we’ve followed an entirely different downwards path of austerity.
Norfolk29
We are obviously using different sources for our information. Did you vote for PR in 2011? I did, and saw John Reid share a platform with David Cameron to defeat the best chance we had of PR in my lifetime. The German system is the one that allowed the so-called Free Democrats share power with who ever won the majority of seats, so long as they were in power. The CDU currently share power with the SDU (which is like the Tories sharing power with Labour). I got the Belgium data from a native who abandoned her country because of the voting system. We share a lot with the Americans,
the most important of which is our enterprise. Like them, we will never sink into the kind of recession that cripples African States and many European States.