As noted in the previous section, local interactions are at the heart of the impacts and effects of austerity and welfare reform. In this regard, Brenner and Theodore (2002:351) convey that:
“cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives – along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management – have been articulated.” In the UK, it is well acknowledged that there is an established North-South divide between the living standards and employment opportunities contingently
experienced by citizens in the northern areas of the country compared with those residing in the South (Hamnett, 2010). However, it appears that it is the towns and cities in the North West of England which seem to be particularly heavily influenced by the effects of the austerity-driven workfare discourse of the Coalition (Centre for Cities, 2011b; 2011c). It has therefore been suggested that not only is it the towns and cities of the North West which are suffering this plight, but it has also become apparent that the effects are felt even more succinctly at the local and even individual household level (Taylor, 2010). It should be noted from the outset that whilst certain settlements are circled out from the rest as being specific hotspots of poverty, it would be naïve for us to infer from this that there is a blanket phenomenon occurring uniformly throughout that settlement and its hinterlands. Indeed even in the locations seemingly blighted by deprivation, it must be considered that there are incredibly affluent areas adjacent to those suffering from the deepest forms of
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poverty seen in the UK (CUF, 2012). Taking the North West of England as a prime example of this, it can be observed that whilst there are indeed a large number of deprived cities as well as deprived areas of cities, there are adjacent cities and areas which are considerably more affluent and are in fact the complete opposite case of the stigmatism attached to issues of poverty and welfare dependency.
Settlements particularly hard hit by the issues associated with the poverty conditions most likely implicated by current government policy discourse are Liverpool,
Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale and Blackpool in the North West (Guardian, 2012). Of further interest is that five of the top ten locations (and henceforth the places most likely to be implicated by the nationwide retrenchment of welfare provision) reside in the Liverpool conurbation, and the one in Blackpool (South Shore) also exhibits the lowest life expectancy of anywhere in England (CUF, 2012). The North West more than others has benefited from the widespread expansion since 1997 of public sector provision, particularly through the number of well-paid jobs which it has provided. However, since the onset of recession and the implementation of the relatively severe austerity measures, the public purse has been reeled in, and with it has gone the funding for many of the welfare-oriented projects previously underlined as part of the drive to eradicate poverty and deprivation in these locations. Henceforth, the combined effects of both rapidly rising unemployment and the relinquishment of benefits for many has led to the socio-economic outlook of the towns and cities of the North West looking extremely bleak. It is therefore becoming clear as to why it is areas predominantly of Merseyside and Greater Manchester where the problems seem to be proliferating most frequently (Ibid).
The first and most prominent location is Liverpool. The city regularly tops national statistics for a wide range of social and economic indicators associated with unemployment, poverty and deprivation, and so it is little surprise that five of the city’s parishes make it into the top ten for the whole of England (ibid). Liverpool as a city has a long tradition in manufacturing and construction, and in particular ship building (Work Foundation, 2009). However, the city’s economy was in decline for much of the 1970’s and 1980’s owing to its diminishing position in the global economy (Sykes et al., 2013). The city has also for a long period been bereft of a vast array of social problems, ranging from unemployment, to poor health and squalid living conditions. The public sector budget for Liverpool is therefore
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enormous, and was expanded substantially under earlier Labour administrations to tackle deprivation, and child poverty in particular (Piachaud, 2012). However, it has also become apparent that a significant ‘dependency culture’ has developed in Liverpool, owing not only to the high proportion of the working age population who are considered long term unemployed, but also due to the high number of people not in employment, education or training (NEETs) and single parent households (Work Foundation, 2011).
A major impact of the current economic slump and austerity measures has been the retrenchment of state welfare accompanied by the slashing of annual council
budgets and a drive towards a discourse of “austerity localism” (Featherstone et al., 2012). This has meant that Liverpool City Council has already had to make
significant cost-cutting savings across the board to the tune of £173m since 2010, with a further £156m of savings needing to be found by 2017, and so are having to make difficult decisions as to where these savings are to be made (Liverpool City Council, 2014). Furthermore, despite government insistence on private sector dynamism, the city is yet to see any of this benefit, with many of the city’s residents remaining encapsulated within a low-pay-no-pay cycle of poverty. Henceforth, both the social and economic outlook for the city look bleak, at least up until the end of the current parliamentary period; citizens can expect specifically targeted welfare
assistance from the government, with many forced to look for jobs which are often low paid and low skilled with few prospects, or may even be non-existent altogether under the Coalition’s work first rhetoric (Standing, 2013a; Standing, 2014).
Furthermore, they will more frequently be left to their own devices to find a way of surviving effectively the severe negative impacts of the economic slump impinging upon their everyday lives. Substantial investment from the public purse is required into the city and its suburbs if the problems are to be even remotely arrested in the coming months and years otherwise the downward spiral will more than likely continue (Davies and Pill, 2011) This will not only lead to individuals and families slipping back from their middle class status’ beyond the poverty threshold as they fail to sustain their expected living standards, but it also implies that those members of the working class who are already poor look set to get even poorer and suffer even greater levels of deprivation, with no feasible route of escape or social mobility (Pearce, 2011).
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The other city to focus on is Manchester and its surrounding satellites. Manchester has an established manufacturing history, but the problem of economic decline became particularly pronounced in the 1970’s, when the neoliberal rhetoric of the global economy led to many jobs and services being outsourced to cheaper
locations. In recent years, the city of Manchester itself has recovered, managing to attract lucrative investment and undertaking large-scale regeneration projects. Coupled to the policy measures of the Labour Government from 1997, this has meant that the city has once again developed into a major socio-economic hub, and the middle class contingent has swelled to unprecedented levels (Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA), 2009). However, it must be considered that there are still significant areas of deprivation within the city whose residents live with substantial poverty and deprivation everyday of their lives despite the efforts of previous governments (CUF, 2012). The situation for many vulnerable groups has been made significantly worse under the auspices of the Coalition Government’s austerity measures. The losses are not as great as for Liverpool; the city has a vibrant private sector and so is not as reliant as the former on the public sector for both employment and to buttress the foundations of the local economy. However it is suffering great hardships due to the enormous levels of savings the city council has been required to make, coupled to the substantial amount of welfare retrenchment being implemented at national, regional and local levels. For instance, Manchester City Council has had to cut £250m from its budget between 2011 and 2015, and in the next 2 years will have to find an additional £70m of savings (Manchester City Council, 2015a). Again this eludes to the discourse of localism being advocated by the Coalition Government (Gregory, 2014), in that budget cuts are imposed onto the local authority which then must decide what to cut, and in turn, which citizens to protect.
The economic downturn along with the austerity regime of the Coalition has meant many are now struggling to maintain the quality of life for themselves and their families, and are more frequently than not slipping back towards the poverty
threshold (JRF, 2012; Taylor-Gooby, 2012a). This has been compounded by the fact that the private sector has not rebounded as robustly in its growth to account for the sheer number of jobs, both public and private, lost as a result of the recession (Tomlinson, 2011). This has meant that many are now suffering from both
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unemployment and lack of welfare support; for some this has meant a return to a lifestyle beneath the poverty threshold, whilst for others it has served merely to intensify the cycle of poverty which they have been entrenched within for much of their working lives (Standing, 2011).
Aside from the city of Manchester itself, some of its satellite towns have not fared anywhere near as well in recent years. Rochdale and Oldham appear badly affected, and since the 1970’s have suffered the same fate of deindustrialisation that their larger neighbour has had to endure (New Economy Manchester, 2011a, 2011b). In contrast however, these former mill towns have been unable to attract the same kind of private investment Manchester has managed to secure, and as such have never really recovered from the effects of neoliberalisation and its associated facets (New Economy Manchester, 2011c). Thus these locations have been in a continuous downward spiral of unemployment coupled to high levels of poverty and deprivation (CUF, 2012). This goes hand in hand with the idea that there are “entrenched problems of worklessness” in many former industrial locations in the North of England (Fletcher, 2011:450). The situation improved slightly under Labour’s Third Way and their programmes of welfare expansion, however since the onset of the recession and the introduction of the Coalition Government’s widespread austerity measures, the rate of decline has intensified to the extent that poverty and
deprivation is now greater than for most other places in England (Centre for Cities, 2011a) (see Figures 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21). This fits well with the portrayal of Meegan et al. (2014), who suggest that the local level is where most of the welfare issues that arise from cuts and unemployment come to fruition.
Rochdale in particular has severe issues with unemployment, with many working class people finding it almost impossible to secure long term and meaningful employment, especially when growth in the private sector is almost stagnant. The 2008-9 crisis led to a 3.3% fall in employment in Rochdale (New Economy
Manchester, 2011c). The future prospects for such places are not promising. With the economy continuing to suffer the after-effects of a drawn out economic slump, the opportunities for jobs in the wider Greater Manchester area are likely to be limited and mediocre at best. Similarly, at a time when the average citizen suffering such hardships is likely to be even more reliant on help and provision from the state, such services are being retrenched beyond recognition as the government localism
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agenda makes it obligatory for local authorities to make enormous and unsustainable savings in the coming months and years (Featherstone et al., 2012). In this regard:
“at present, the impacts of welfare reform on residents and places are still somewhat uncertain but given the extent of benefit dependency, in
Manchester they are likely to be far reaching” (Manchester City Council, 2015b:n.p).
With private sector growth being decidedly sluggish, and with little signs of
improvement, many working and middle class citizens could easily become sucked back in to the deprivation rhetoric and a relentless cycle of poverty (Pearce, 2011).
Another consideration involves what forms of co-operation are similarly coming to fruition at local scales within cities as methods of mitigating the negative implications afforded by the policy processes under the new welfare geographies discourse. It has become increasingly apparent that individuals at the local level are necessarily being required to take overall responsibility for the provision of their own welfare (McDonald and Marston, 2005). As Newman (2011:91) notes:
“policy has increasingly been driven by a desire to embed a new consensus in which it is accepted…that the unemployed have responsibility for tackling their own unemployment.”
In fact, with the national government progressively retracting funding from local authorities which has been essential for the sustainability of a vast number of seemingly indispensable welfare services, such authorities are having to make difficult decisions as to where to make savings, and therefore, which of their constituents will be most adversely affected by the austerity measures being
implemented (Manchester Evening News, 2012). As Knox et al. (2008) have noted, local authorities find themselves tied to a string of nationally devised policies, indicating that public expenditure is mediated through political motives, rather than socio-economic priorities. To this end, with cities often representing areas of high concentrations of poverty, vulnerability and henceforth welfare dependence, these are frequently being earmarked as the key locations for local authorities to make the necessary fiscal rationalisations attributable to having their budgets slashed
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Thus with such implications for large numbers of dependent individuals and families coming to the fore, it is now becoming increasingly important for people to become “aspirational citizens,” (Raco, 2009:436) helping themselves as a mode of replacing the effective safety net of services which have been seemingly whipped away from under their feet. In this regard, with resources not forthcoming to undertake such projects, there is an inherent need, both in the present and most certainly for the future as the austerity drive starts to bite even harder, for vulnerable groups to co- operate and assist each other in order to strengthen their resolve in mitigating the negativities of the new welfare geographies of austerity in the UK. Therefore, as Ross (2009:63) points out:
“community self-government forces people to become responsible for their own social welfare without being able to access the necessary resources to actualise their welfare delivery plans.”
However, whilst their perceptible susceptibility to austerity is clear, the concentration of such individuals within cities offers a clear opportunity for effective path-dependent co-operation and resilience (Martin, 2012; Lowndes and McCaughie, 2013), in order to ameliorate the adverse connotations which are inevitable to those who have for so long been heavily reliant on the Welfare State as a basic guarantor of minimum living standards. However there are significant doubts arising over whether such a process can be implemented and sustained without massive state support (Smith, 2010), and this is another aspect of the welfare-to-work discourse which must be challenged by the forthcoming research.
It should now be apparent that there are significant changes taking place in the UK and beyond in relation to austerity and welfare reform. Much has been written in recent years about these processes across various scales, from the international level down to that of individuals in cities, and how both intricate geographies of welfare and welfare geographies are emerging as a result. It is important however to question not only whether the reforms being made are (re)new(ed), but also to emphasise that the extent of this (re)new(al) might vary at different scales. In this way, we could see a stronger or weaker shift at different scales and in different situations.
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