In addition to education, critics point to the damaging impact of austerity cuts first introduced in 2010 across a range of other policy areas:

Housing

Housing has become a full-blown crisis since 2010: more expensive, more scarce, and less secure in many parts of the country, especially for young people and low-income working families, as successive governments have let the market balloon while imposing hefty austerity cuts to housing support.

Rents have soared, while wages have stalled. Tenant insecurity has risen. Overcrowding is at record levels. Homelessness has increased. One in 200 people in England are homeless, according to Shelter. Rough sleeping is up over the decade: 600 homeless people died on the streets or in hostels in 2017, up 24% since 2010.

Local government

Back in 2012, a notorious PowerPoint slide circulated in local government called the Graph of Doom. It demonstrated that if austerity cuts and demographic pressures (more older people living longer) continued, councils would be unable to afford to provide anything other than social care within a few years.

Many town halls believe that point is fast approaching. After nearly a decade of cuts, councils spend a fifth less than in 2010; larger councils now spend 60% of their diminished budget on adult and children’s social care, meaning other services – parks, libraries, swimming pools, Sure Start centres, fixing potholes, bus subsidies, winter road gritting, museums – have had to be eviscerated.

Social care

Around 1.4 million adults in the UK fail to get the basic social care support they need, such as help with washing, dressing and eating, according to the charity Age UK. Rising demand from an ageing population, coupled with shrinking budgets, has led to ever tighter rationing.

Since 2010, adult social care spending in England has shrunk by £7bn, with the government averting crises with a series of “sticking plaster” funding packages. Long promised plans for putting social care funding on a sustainable level have been lost in the Brexit long grass, while there is little optimism the autumn public spending review will come to the rescue.

In children’s social care, welfare cuts, soaring poverty levels and rising parental mental illness have contributed to an explosion in child protection activity. Since 2010, assessments of children at risk of harm or neglect have gone up 77%, while child protection plans increased by a quarter, and children in care increased by 15%.

English councils predict a £2bn budget shortfall in children’s services by 2020, forcing growing cuts to preventive services such as family support to meet the cost of child protection.

NHS

Eight years of tiny budget increases have left the NHS in England seriously overstretched, chronically understaffed and £4bn in the red.

Limiting the NHS to 1% rises – far below the historic 3.7% average – has also forced patients to endure increasingly long waits for A&E care, cancer treatment, planned operations and to see a GP at their local surgery.

In-depth research published last week found levels of public satisfaction across Britain with the NHS at their lowest ever (53%) and the highest levels ever of dissatisfaction with GP services. Delays in accessing care were the main driver of rising discontent, it found.

Police

Police chiefs have long been warning about the impact of budget cuts on their ability to do their job, and the issue has come to the fore with the escalating concern about violent crime.

Home Office research leaked to the Guardian last year found that falling officer numbers were likely to be “an underlying driver that has allowed the rise [in violent crime] to continue”.

In Theresa May’s six years as home secretary to 2016, police numbers fell by 20,000 as she slashed their budgets while insisting that they could cut crime by eliminating inefficiencies. The number of officers fell from a peak of 144,353 in 2009 to 122,404 by March 2018.

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has trumpeted the extra £970m in police funding pledged for the next financial year. However, police chiefs have warned that this is too low, and that some of the cash will be swallowed up by other liabilities, possibly leading to a further fall in headcount.

By any standard, 2015 is likely to be a watershed year for UK public managers. There are a number of hazards that can’t be easily avoided. A lack of money, coupled with the likely behaviour of politicians in the runup to an election, threatens to seriously undermine public managers’ roles and to jeopardise their reputation.

Public finances are not stable. All the parties know that significant savings are required to get the UK back to a fiscal equilibrium following the unique shift in government debt to bail out financial services. We are approximately a third of the way through a decade of cuts. As the economy recovers, every 1% increase in interest rates will add £8bn to the annual bill of £100bn for debt payments, which dwarfs many departmental budgets and sees annual debt charges approaching the NHS budget in scale.

For the public managers making savings, the discretionary funding taps were switched off long ago. So the difficult job is to withdraw or remodel remaining services even though there is a statutory duty to provide them. For this to be done well and sustainably takes time and involves significant engagement with service users. The scale of savings and service transformation is itself a major project and public managers are often not given time to plan in an appropriate way.

I know comfortably over 50 people formerly in Local Government who have lost their jobs just in my field of economic development. A number approach me every month with thoughts on the scope for collaboration. Last year’s cuts are now starting to bite and it is really sad to see once proud, well qualified and hard working people trying to keep their pecker up in the face of dwindling redundancy reserves and little prospect of a job in the short term. I warned last year that significant job losses in places dependent on public sector employment would have a major and long term withering effect on communities. I was doubly concerned from an RSN perspective that a disproportionate number of these places are rural.

This article which concerns County Durham albeit profiling an urban settlement there – Consett  – is redolent with many features that would apply to dozens of rural service centres. It tells us:

Some of the consequences of the era of austerity are instantly visible. The county court closed its doors this year, and the building has an optimistic sign fastened to its brick wall, declaring “redevelopment opportunity”. Connexions, the government-funded careers advice service for young people, shut in August (and now has an Offices To Let board hanging from it). Its departure is particularly lamented by local people in the light of last week’s unemployment figures which revealed that unemployment among 18-24-year-olds in the area has risen by 13% in the space of a year and now stands at 35%.”

I feel a bit like a rabbit in the headlights bereft of any straightforward solution to this problem which is global and viral – but we need to get our heads together somewhere to think about how best to deal with it. In the meantime more well qualified, hardworking people with families to support from the public sector are finding themselves on the employment scapheap. Anyone up for helping me form a virtual local authority made up of the best people now out of work which could provide coordinated interim support for the other 300 or so councils, covering the work of key departments where they discover they have cut too deep?