Introduction

As is widely discussed in this book, policies under the post-2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government were dominated by the spectre of the 2008 private sector financial crisis, which by 2010, had turned into a global recession, reducing economic production and seeing rises in unemployment. The UK, in common with other G20 countries, initially adopted a fiscal stimulus approach (quantitative easing), which slowed the recession but led to a sharp rise in the budget deficit, to 11.6% in 2009/10 (ONS, 2010), the highest since 1945. What had started out as a private financial crisis was very quickly turned into a crisis of public policy, particularly in countries such as Ireland and Greece, which found it difficult to borrow money at preferential rates to service their growing deficits.

The coalition government that came to power in 2010 took the position that addressing the deficit was an economic necessity, and social policy therefore followed this aim (see Chapter Two). The primary mechanism used to achieve this was cuts to public expenditure – a policy paradigm that has come to be known as ‘austerity’. The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review detailed how these cuts would be distributed across departments (see Table 14.1).

However, simply examining the scale of the cuts by department masks the fact that they fell disproportionately on certain groups of people. Those dependent on the state for a proportion or the whole of their income were more affected by the changes than the average: while an estimated 21% of people in the UK are living in poverty, they are bearing the brunt of 39% of the funding cuts. Moreover, over half the cuts fell on social security and local government, despite them making up only 27% of central government expenditure – and 60% of local government expenditure goes on social care for children and adults (Duffy, 2013). The purpose of this chapter is to examine the impact that this paradigm and the policies introduced by the coalition government had on four groups of people who are at risk of inequality, poverty and social exclusion: women, working-age disabled people, older people and young children. Data were not easily available to assess the impact of policies on people from minority ethnic groups, but, where possible, the cumulative impact of intersectionality, that is, where equalities issues such as gender, disability, age and ethnicity intersect, is discussed.