Most children went back to school this week. Some didn’t. Out of 147 schools identified as having a potentially dangerous type of concrete, pupils at 24 schools are back to the Covid-era reality of remote, online education.
As the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC to its friends) crisis (c)rumbles on, the focus is shifting to the government’s alleged failure to properly invest in infrastructure. Under a particularly intense spotlight are spending choices made over the past fifteen years that may have prevented the panicked closure of schools last week. Among them, the decision by the coalition government (and then Education Secretary, Michael Gove) to cut the Building Schools for the Future programme in 2010, and the decision made by the then Chancellor (now Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak) to halve the rebuilding programme requested by the Department for Education in 2021.
One of the many things this crisis has highlighted is the government’s austerity agenda that dominated public spending decisions for much of the decade before Covid. Like a RAAC plank in a post-war school building, it is ageing badly. It has already come under scrutiny during the early phases of the Covid-19 hearings (which focussed on how prepared the UK was for a pandemic) and is part of the basis for the opposition’s campaign strategy for the upcoming general election.
What’s of interest to this newsletter, though, is the fact that no one ever really supported austerity. Since 1983, British Social Attitudes have asked a question on whether or not taxes should be higher, lower or about the same to facilitate more, less or about the same level of spending on health, education and social benefits. Support for reducing taxes and spending less on public services peaked at a lofty 9% - yes, 9% - in 2010. It’s not been that high since. In most years it has been 6% or lower.
Below is this edition’s very boring chart.
This doesn’t mean that attitudes on tax and spend are unchanging. Quite the opposite. There are clearly visible cycles in public opinion: generally, the greater the parsimony of the current Chancellor of the Exchequer he more likely we are to demand higher taxes and higher spending. Eventually, as the cycle wears on, we see spending as being a little too high and want it to be reined in. But, opinion-wise, we take our foot off the accelerator without putting it down on the brake: we never really want spending to be lowered, just maintained.
What does this mean?
Does this mean the coalition government were out of step with public opinion? Or did austerity not really happen? Was it all just a dream?
Most polls from the era show support for the coalition’s fiscal plans. But that support is often weak and heavily caveated - the ComRes poll cited in this 2014 piece suggested only 33% supported spending cuts, with 26% against. That is partly because of successful communications: austerity wasn’t a policy, it was an analysis of public spending restraint. It was pitched as the only way to balance the books and in 2010 the outgoing Labour government left a note joking that there was ‘no money left’. Spending on ‘core’ areas like health was never cut in purely numerical terms. Since 2010, governments have talked about reducing waste and cutting bureaucracy and red tape, not cutting back on essential services. Indeed, when announcing the end of the Building Schools for the Future programme in 2010 Michael Gove said just that: ‘the whole way we build schools need radical reform to ensure more money is not wasted on pointless bureaucracy’. That pointless bureaucracy led the current Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to promise in 2023 to spend ‘whatever it takes’ to fixed RAAC affected schools.
For me, the key point from this data is that the UK public have never been a small-government, low-taxes population. We have consistently wanted money spent on public services and even at our most austere, we are generally of the view that spending should be maintained, not cut.