🔗 Share this article

I was fortunate. A short while ago, I was cycling downhill and struck a road cavity. The front wheel folded into an infinity symbol. I went over the handlebars without time to break my fall, landed on my face. My helmet and glasses took most of the impact. Remarkably, I escaped with only minor injuries.

My glasses were banjaxed, my cycle was in need of serious work and my clothes were torn. Altogether, that pothole has cost me about £450. I count myself lucky again – I can manage the cost. But the point is this: repairing a pothole runs between £45 and £90. Ignoring it leads to higher expenses. God knows how many other people have pranged their bikes or wrecked their car tyres in the same hole. Between us, we may have paid hundreds of times the cost of its repair. Should individuals endure serious harm, the NHS will bear the burden. One of my correspondents tells me: “It's been three months of healing from a bicycle mishap involving a pothole that led to a hospital airlift for critical injuries. Along with a cerebral hemorrhage (helmet notwithstanding), I broke several bones and remain dependent on crutches for mobility.” The cost to the health service must be huge; the cost to him incalculable.

Austerity – failing to address potholes and other public service shortfalls – does not cut costs.

On the contrary, it costs us a fortune. The tax breaks for the affluent are matched by continual costs for the majority.

There are many examples of false economy. For example, the government may at last be persuaded to remove the Tories’ vicious, Malthusian two-child benefit cap. However, numerous individuals haven't realized that behind it lies another barrier: the household benefits ceiling. Should households get funds for a third child, it might exceed the household cap, leaving them little improved.

The household limit produces drastic and adverse effects. It guarantees that rental costs, even in subsidized housing, are nearly always out of reach for impacted families, largely led by single parents. The result is that they are thrown into temporary accommodation, which local authorities must provide at far greater expense: roughly £2.3bn a year. Relocation to temporary homes also restricts career options for parents and academic achievement for children, fostering significant hardship that manifests as health disorders, inevitably leading to more economic repercussions.

Back in 2019, a parliamentary group urged the government to “perform a comprehensive cost-benefit study of the benefit cap”.

The administration turned down the plea, but indicated they might look into it down the line. I checked with the Department for Work and Pensions – it still hasn’t happened.

Sustaining poverty among citizens is a pricey extravagance. Poverty endures in wealthy nations due to political decisions to sustain impoverishment. This selection is guided by two main drivers. One is a longstanding, ingrained and unreasonable notion that poverty is a fault requiring penalty. Secondly, employers' desire to maintain a climate of fear, ensuring individuals accept grueling and humiliating jobs for poor wages.

Consider the case of adult social care.

Around 2 million elderly people are not receiving the care they need. Numerous younger people who might work with adequate care are prevented from doing so. About 2.6 million individuals, predominantly female, have abandoned careers to look after relatives, with no viable options. They sacrifice an average of £5,800 yearly in wages, a massive total burden on the economy.

Insufficient care drives many people into the arms of the NHS: at any one time, 13% of NHS beds are occupied by people waiting for social care support. Sufficient financing would generate substantial economic gains, as effective care relies on extensive staffing. Per the Future Social Care Coalition, each £1 put into care work produces £1.75 in the broader economy. But, as a parliamentary inquiry found, evidence of the costs of failing to provide sufficient care “is scandalously scant or even absent from decision making”. Authorities tally the expenses of providing services, but overlook the costs of not providing them.

The gap in state funding for social care has triggered a fiscal emergency in nearly all local councils.

Other provisions are being slashed to minimal levels. The pothole issue, simply put, stems directly from the social care shortfall. In any exploration of the costs and benefits of social care spending, you could include the price of people being airlifted to hospital because the roads are falling apart.

Undoubtedly, we should be cautious about framing everything economically: vital expenses typically result in net treasury loss, a toll for a humane community. But this should not prevent us from remarking on the utter perversity of counting only the costs of state spending, while ignoring the benefits.

The administration, with a meaningless description for individuals affected by road defects, interim homes, or financial strain, asserts austerity has ceased, citing a small, even if transient uptick in state expenditure versus GDP.

But when it leaves so many essential services underfunded, the technical definition becomes a sophisticated lie. A more honest definition of austerity is a decline in services caused by a shortfall in funding.

The bill for a crisis caused by the ultra-rich – the 2008 bank crash and the vast state bailout it triggered – has been handed to the poor. But this situation is neither essential nor fated. Should Labour decide, the upcoming budget could steer us toward a new path, where we avoid shattered spectacles, wrecked bicycles, fractured bones, removals, destitution and abandonment, while the wealthiest enjoy private planes, yachts, spas and multiple properties.

They must bear the expense via income tax, wealth tax and a more equitable local tax or property valuation system, or the rest will face greater burdens.

There will be a price – a political one – for authorities in challenging the extensive influence network of the wealthy and halting our 14-year austerity period. But the cost of failing to do so, for all of us, is so much higher.