“Austerity, the cuts to capital spending and Brexit have had a bigger impact on our economy” than was projected when they were implemented, Rachel Reeves told an investment event in Birmingham last October. The attention the comments received reflected anxiety around the 26 November budget announcement, particularly over the prospect of another round of cuts to public services. Reeves is correct, but the impact of austerity runs far deeper than the economy. It has left a legacy of trauma and mental ill-health that plagues Britain’s children today.
As a child, I saw my mother burst into tears over fears that we wouldn’t be able to afford food the next month. I saw her mental health worsen with each new announced benefits cut. I bounced between nine different homes with her, and we lived through months of hidden homelessness. The chaos and instability of these years left me with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
My experiences weren’t unique. Last June, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children repeated their call for the government to declare a national emergency of childhood neglect, having previously noted a 106% increase between 2018 and 2023. The charity cited research, interviewing children’s social care and education professionals on the rate of child neglect, in which 54% of respondents reported an increase in neglect cases across their professional lives, with 90% attributing this to rising poverty and the cost-of-living crisis.
Austerity measures have made poverty far worse
In April, Amnesty International published the Social Insecurity Report, detailing the UK’s failure to meet criteria laid out in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The ICESCR emphasises a country’s responsibility to meet basic needs including food, housing and education for its citizens. Referencing surveys and interviews with 782 social security claimants and their advisors, Amnesty’s report argues that post-2010’s austerity measures have violated the UK’s duties under the ICESCR.
Children have been hit especially hard by these failures; the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated in 2024 that up to 4.5 million children in the UK – or one in three – are impoverished. That same year, the BBC noted the biggest increase in poverty in 30 years, with 300,000 children falling into absolute poverty between 2022 and 2023. I’d like to argue that these Amnesty and NSPCC reports are related; that the increase in poverty we’ve seen since austerity began, has been such a contributing factor to rates of child neglect that we should consider austerity politics a cause (if not a form) of child abuse.
Critics of austerity have pointed out its myriad failures for over a decade. Grace Blakeley skilfully details the damage it has done to daily life in Britain and argues that because cuts to public investment ultimately slashed productivity and growth, austerity didn’t even work on its own terms. A 2022 University of Glasgow study estimated that a damning 335,000 excess deaths between 2012 and 2019 could be traced to austerity measures. And in 2019, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights argued that the government’s stripping of welfare had created a Hobbesian life for the poor: “solitary … nasty, brutish and short”.
Poverty has created a mental health crisis in our young
Missing from much of this criticism is a focus on what austerity has done to the UK’s children. Ian Cummins, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Salford, cites 2010s austerity measures as having exacerbated “the overall burden of mental distress and marginalisation within the UK” (particularly among impoverished children), and Dr Dainius Pūras’ 2019 report to the UN argued that austerity measures taken around the globe “did not contribute positively to good mental health”. This crisis has worsened in recent years, with the adult psychiatric morbidity survey finding a 47% rise in common mental health conditions and a quadrupling in self-harm rates from 2014 to 2024.
Jumbo Chan’s 2019 article The Children of Austerity details austerity’s devastating effects on young people’s services, with a third of all state-run secondary schools being in deficit in 2019 and almost 500 libraries and 600 youth centres closing since 2010. Young people with special educational needs were hit hardest by cuts, and the report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime linked the rise in knife crime to the closure of youth centres. It’s not hard to see how the disappearance of ‘third spaces‘ in which young people can develop social and supportive communities would be detrimental to a generation’s mental health.
Trauma plays a role in mental health
On top of isolation, the poverty austerity has caused has likely led to higher trauma exposure among young people. Studies on trauma in the UK are lacking, but the literature that does exist has repeatedly linked trauma rates and socioeconomic deprivation, with recent research from King’s College London establishing that those from deprived areas experience higher rates of PTSD and tend to start treatment with more severe symptoms.
A 2019 King’s College study found up to 31% of young people had experienced traumatic incidents by age 18, with one in 13 of the general population having experienced PTSD. Of those with PTSD, three quarters had another mental health disorder, one quarter were out of education or employment, half had self-harmed, and a fifth had attempted suicide.
As Professor Eamon McCrory of the UK Trauma Council has argued, exposure to trauma in youth and the chronic stress these experiences engender often make children more vulnerable to mental health issues in their adulthood. While the links aren’t one-to-one, with not everyone growing up in poverty experiencing major trauma and vice versa, the research still suggests that we must understand traumatic experiences as clustering among deprivation; as a structural issue that austerity’s deepening of poverty has worsened.
We can’t understand austerity without child trauma
A 2020 report by Scotland’s Robertson Trust analysed the link between poverty and trauma extensively, arguing that while neither should be considered causes of the other, evidence consistently demonstrates an association between the two. The report suggests that austerity’s undermining of the social safety net has made it easier to slip into poverty and made it harder to access treatment for trauma-related illness.
While trauma, poverty and austerity are not causes of each other, they are so interlinked that if we try to understand one without the others, we miss a crucial part of the picture. And with the voting public’s increasingly rightward shift suggesting that further austerity is a very real possibility facing Britain, our poorest children need to be considered. Professor Sarah Marie Hall argues in her book Everyday Life in Austerity: Family, Friends and Intimate Relations, that an understanding of austerity’s effects on interpersonal relationships and people’s experience of their day-to-day lives is necessary to grasp its full, devastating scope. I’d add that a key component to this must be an analysis of the impact of austerity on childhood trauma and the long-lasting mental health struggles it creates.
Rachel Reeves is right about the damage austerity has done to the economy, but to focus on finance risks missing just how detrimental its effects have been. Last November’s budget release thankfully signalled a turn away from austerity. But Labour’s attack on disabled households the previous spring already demonstrated a failure to account for the multifaceted legacy of harm and trauma such economic policies have inflicted on Britain for well over a decade. Should a future budget return to the economic logic of the poor subsidising the lifestyles of the rich, we’d do well to remember the trauma the last decade and a half has inflicted on our youth.
