The Resolution Foundation has estimated that Labour’s spending plans commit the party to around £18bn of annual budget cuts over the next parliament. As they stand, these would affect “unprotected” areas of government such as the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Justice, local councils and higher education – and a funding shortfall for a depleted NHS. Ahead of this week’s king’s speech, when the new government will lay out its legislative agenda, five public sector workers give their verdict on Labour’s approach.
Emma Vincent Miller on law: Without urgent investment in legal aid, the most vulnerable will continue to suffer
Emma Vincent Miller
As a social welfare solicitor, I see the impact our broken legal aid system has on vulnerable people. Demand is surging for legal support on issues relating to housing, welfare and social care. But with legal aid fees on the floor, it simply is not possible for firms like mine to deal with the 100-plus requests we receive every week.
Labour says nothing in its manifesto about legal aid, but investment is vital for many of the party’s pledges to translate into real improvements. For instance, Labour says it is committed to tackling arbitrary evictions, as well as exploitation, discrimination and poor standards in the private rented sector. But this simply is not possible without broadening access to legal advice and the courts.
As it stands, the rules around eligibility for legal aid are so strict that only the very poorest can access free advice on issues such as housing. And even if the eligibility rules were relaxed, there simply aren’t enough legal aid lawyers left to meet the demand for advice – hardly surprising given that civil legal aid rates were last increased in 1996.
Keir Starmer is wary of calls for Labour to increase spending. But investment in legal aid will save money. Early help with debt and welfare issues can prevent possession proceedings further down the line, saving our local councils money. Access to advice from a solicitor will mean fewer litigants in person clogging up our already backlogged courts.
Recent reporting on the DWP carer’s allowance scandal – in which carers have been left in huge debt or even prosecuted due to minor benefit breaches – has revealed the human cost when people cannot access legal help. Without urgent investment in legal aid, unfair decision-making goes unchecked, and it’s the most vulnerable who pay the price.
I started my first full-time job in higher education in 2009 and watched as, the following year, students protested in vain against the Tory/Lib Demcoalition’s hike of tuition fees to £9,000 a year. Ironically, that increase gave universities some protection from cuts in the early years of austerity. It didn’t last. Graduates are now repaying their fees with an additional marginal tax rate of 9%. Their value to universities, however, has declined so far in real terms that we’re heading back to the funding low point of 2011.
As a result, significant cuts are being made across the sector. The University and College Union branch at Queen Mary, University of London has identified 64 universities that are making redundancies this academic year, with specialist courses being hit particularly hard. Colleagues who I used to see at conferences every year are suddenly no longer there. Those of us left are dealing with huge challenges, not least half-empty classrooms as the cost of living crisis forces students to take on more paid work.
The budget squeeze not only compromises teaching, but the research and innovation vital to Labour’s plans for growth. This really is an existential question for some universities: without urgent action to address the funding crisis, institutional bankruptcies will happen. The consequences of such a failure would be devastating, not only for their students and staff, but for wider communities. Think about the hundreds, if not thousands of workers, employed in each area. A lack of funding would be disastrous for them, as well as Britain’s academic standing in the world.
Catherine Fletcher is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University
Councils like mine were subjected to savage cuts over the 14 years of Tory government. Sheffield has had half of its funding removed in real terms, and the picture is no better nationally – 800 public libraries and 64 museums have been forced to close. The first casualties are always “discretionary” services, such as funding for youth clubs and community organisations. But there is nothing optional about these services. Among other things, they are vital to reducing the wider strain on the welfare state.
It should go without saying that for a new Labour government to consider renewing austerity would be an unforced error born of short-termism and a politics too focused on Westminster.
Austerity is not simply the result of a flawed economic outlook or Thatcherite ideological zeal. It is as much the consequence of our heavily centralised political system. The council question shouldn’t be about whether or not to fund them, but about how much the government is willing to devolve power – whether that’s for the purpose of raising our own funds, delivering local industrial strategies or introducing rent controls to fix broken housing markets.
Too many people across the political spectrum only consider councils from the perspective of spending – to cut or not to cut. Yet councils have the potential to drive growth, lead the charge for decarbonisation and nature restoration, support and create local businesses, and to transform their surroundings – if only a government would let us.
Keir Starmer has previously promised “full-fat” devolution. If he’s serious about transforming this country then he must deliver new powers and radical levels of funding for local authorities, so that we can rebuild this country from the bottom up.
The single most valuable NHS asset Labour possesses is the hope – however fragile – of its 1.3 million staff. Fourteen years of witnessing the NHS crumble, by design, into failure – not to mention working amid such sustained, engineered decline – has savaged staff morale as well as standards of care. To be clear, conditions are abysmal. Staff are broken and patients are being failed in their millions. But, and it’s a big but, Wes Streeting has a workforce who, overwhelmingly, want it to work, who want to go the extra mile, who believe in the NHS and who love caring for patients. Harness all that, and recovery is possible.
The elephant in the room is funding. Staff long to trust the new health secretary, to work with him to fix things for patients. The NHS is protected from cuts. But as the Nuffield Trust has pointed out, Labour’s proposed 1.1% rise in spending year-on-year would be lower than even the austerity years – and we all know what havoc they wreaked. Vagueness on funding has worked as an electoral strategy, but Streeting has vowed to be a man of his word.
To maintain any flicker of hope, NHS staff have to see him deliver. The promised commitments to cut waiting times, increase the number of GPs and double the number of cancer scanners are all vital steps forward, but they require investment. Without significant new funding, they risk turning into Boris Johnson’s mythical “40 new hospitals” – icons of the enraging, empty mendaciousness of old. In medicine, trust is everything. Make it happen, Mr Streeting.
Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
Anonymous on welfare: Benefits claimants and staff must be lifted out of the cost of living chasm
As a team leader on universal credit operations, I and my colleagues have worked through some of the most seismic changes in public services since 2010.
The introduction of digital benefit, universal credit and the delivery to millions during the pandemic – followed by the migration of millions more claims from “legacy” benefits – saw huge ebbs and flows in workload and an environment of constant change. Frontline staff caseloads have doubled, then trebled, while salaries have barely kept pace with minimum wage rises.
Hybrid working after Covid drew insults from ministers about work-shy staff; while the government simultaneously and dramatically shrank the estate to achieve savings on rents and infrastructure, leaving many workers in decaying 1970s office blocks.
There must be no more austerity for our department. Budget savings simply cannot be drawn from either benefit claimants or the staff that deliver the services, hammered as we have been by Tory dogma on benefit “scroungers” and “lazy” civil servants. Labour must change the narrative – but, perhaps most importantly, fix some major flaws. Managing your own claim is impossible for many vulnerable claimants – and that problem holds within it the potential for further overpayment scandals that could dwarf the one on carer’s allowance revealed by the Guardian earlier this year. The new prime minister must invest and professionalise the service, continue digital transformation without penalties for those who struggle with it, and, most of all, lift both staff and claimants out of the cost of living ch
The Guardian