Voters believe that privatisation of public services has deepened regional inequality and “left behind” parts of Britain in the name of profit, new research has found.  

Polling conducted by Survation asked members of the public why they supported the renationalisation of public services such as public transport, utilities and the Royal Mail.

The most popular reason given by supporters of public ownership was that extra funds should go back into services rather than to shareholders, with 41 per cent citing this as the reason for their support.

A roughly equal number, 40 per cent, also said they believe that “privately owned companies prioritise profitable areas over providing a good service to everyone”.

The finding comes after a torrid few years for railway services in the north of England that cumulated with the government taking the Northern rail franchise back into public ownership on a temporary basis. 

The Trump administration has proposed a shift in rules that would make it “nearly impossible” for Americans to sue for housing discrimination caused by algorithms, according to tech scholars and civil rights groups.

Absolving companies of wrongdoing when algorithms are involved could have a major effect on the housing market, which often relies on automation – in the form of background checks, credit score analysis, and analysing an applicant’s history – to decide whether to rent or sell someone a home.

The new ruling would raise the bar for legal challenges against housing discrimination, making cases brought against landlords and lenders less likely to succeed.

It does this through tweaking the interpretation of the “disparate-impact” standard of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which permits the use of statistical analysis to identify patterns of discrimination and prohibits discriminatory conduct, even if the conduct does not have “discriminatory intent”.

Representatives from New York University, the AI Now Institute, the University of Maryland, non-profit Center on Race Inequality, and the Law and Princeton encouraged the administration to withdraw the proposed rule in the lengthy letter issued on Friday.

Residents were left scratching their heads after a £6,000 bus shelter appeared on a street where no buses run.

The shelter popped up in place of a rusty old pole on Tickhill Road in Maltby, South Yorkshire, earlier this month.

But council officials were left red-faced after it emerged the two-bus-a-day service along the road was axed back in March.

Digital technologies can be valuable tools to improve public services and reduce health and social inequalities, but should not be adopted as “fashion trends” that leave some people behind.

While new technologies like chatbots or artificial intelligence (AI) get a lot of attention, experts at a recent Guardian roundtable event, supported by DXC Technology, agreed digital services should be adopted only when they can genuinely make systems more efficient for staff or end users.

It’s also vital to ensure digital improvements benefit vulnerable groups, and there should be a range of ways to access public services, rather than simply switching to digital-by-default, agreed the panel. In 2018 there were still 5.3 million adults in the UK who were digitally excluded because they lack internet access or have low levels of digital literacy, including people from low-income groups, the elderly, and those living in rural communities.

“Before we even get to the technical barriers there are access barriers as a direct result of poverty or low income,” said Emma Revie, chief executive of the Trussell Trust. “[Digital public services] shouldn’t be just another thing people are excluded from.”

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.

Think of it as a £2bn reality check. That’s probably what charities have lost over the past five or six years in terms of reduced net income from contracts for delivering public services. It’s a far cry from some of the giddy growth forecasts that were still being made even as austerity kicked in. As recently as 2011 Tory peer and sometime government “big society” adviser Nat Wei was predicting that the value of payment-by-results contracts to voluntary organisations could rise to £60bn a year, dwarfing any revenue lost through cuts in conventional funding. As it is, charities’ total revenue from national and local government bodies is at its lowest level since 2007-08. According to voluntary sector umbrella body NCVO it stood at £13.3bn in 2012-13, with income from contracts and fees accounting for 83% of that. This figure is down £1.7bn from 2009-10. The corresponding preliminary estimate for 2013-14 is £12.9bn total revenue, pointing to a £2bn drop in contract and fee income since 2009-10. When you combine that with the high-profile collapse of Kids Company, and the far lower-profile but arguably more alarming closure of adoption and fostering charity BAAF, it seems clear that the sustainability of the contracting model is under strain.

The action is being taken in response to public sector cuts and reforms (including changes to pension schemes).

On the one hand, the main goal of reform from the Government’s perspective is to provide public services which have greater flexibility and are adaptable to individual needs. On the other hand, this shift towards a delivery-based philosophy has resulted in greater use of both the private and voluntary sectors.

This can work well and meet the complex needs of individuals. However, the instance of Southern Cross being dependent on property tycoons to reduce rents to enable them to carry on caring for 31,000 elderly and vulnerable people reminds us how situations can go horribly wrong. Importantly, these pieces illuminate the importance and vital role of “public service”.

It explains “The Government was on a collision course with public sector workers today as the prospect of a national strike in protest at cuts in jobs, services and pensions came a step closer. Delegates at the annual conference of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) agreed to a ballot of more than 250,000 civil servants for industrial action.

“Voting will start next week and the result will be known by mid-June, raising the threat of co-ordinated strikes with other workers, including teachers, on June 30.”

I honestly don’t know what the answer is but I am concerned that rural England faces the rough end of the stick.

The rough end of the stick, in terms of both service reductions through the strike (distance from services being an aggravating factor in terms of those affected by a withdrawal of labour) and ultimately job losses in rural areas in the public sector being tough to replace.

It’s the pensions issue which worries me most for the future, in that I cant see how, with the double whammy of recession and demographic challenge, the nation can afford to continue funding public sector pensions into the longer term.

Not that, as a local government pension scheme holder, I feel happy about any of this – like many reading this it is more a case of feeling trapped. We live in very difficult and unprecedented times.