Add the 227,000 Covid excess deaths to the austerity death toll

Austerity has killed and will kill again. That is the loud, clear conclusion of Module One of the UK Covid-19 inquiry, the long-awaited interim report in the ongoing public investigation into the government’s response to the 2020 pandemic.

Today’s findings contain two sobering conclusions. The first: that despite what many believed about our capabilities, the UK was woefully underprepared for a pandemic of these proportions. As the report sets out, the preparedness exercises we undertook were too narrow and our strategy was “outdated and lacked adaptability”. The second: that the historic and systematic underfunding of UK public services deeply impacted our response and hastened the spread of the virus. 

Chair of the Inquiry, Baroness Hallett writes that going into the pandemic “there had been a slowdown in health improvement, and health inequalities had widened”. She adds: “High pre-existing levels of heart disease, diabetes, respiratory illness and obesity, and general levels of ill-health and health inequalities, meant that the UK was more vulnerable. Public services, particularly health and social care, were running close to, if not beyond, capacity in normal times.” 

She does not stop there. On page 123, she points out that the surge capacity of the UK to respond to a pandemic was “constrained by their funding”. Again, on page 127, Hallett says that “the prioritisation and reprioritisation of limited resources as a cause of inaction” was a “widely recurring theme” throughout the evidence.

It is not hard to see where the trail of destruction begins. Back in 2010, the new Conservative administration started cutting public services after accusing its Labour predecessors of “failing to mend the roof while the sun was shining”. “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity,” said prime minister David Cameron, while his chancellor, George Osborne, callously called for cuts of up to 40 per cent in departmental budgets. 

Austerity did not just leave the services haemorrhaging, it left the UK population vulnerable too. The report makes clear the impact of austerity on national inequalities, fuelling the spread of disease. “Resilience depends on having a resilient population,” Hallett writes. “The existence and persistence of vulnerability in the population is a long-term risk to the UK.” 

She adds that as the UK entered the Covid-19 pandemic, there were “substantial systematic health inequalities by socio-economic status, ethnicity, area-level deprivation, region, social excluded minority groups and inclusion health groups”. As Professors Bambra and Marmot told the inquiry: “In short, the UK entered the pandemic with its public services depleted, health improvement stalled, health inequalities increased and health among the poorest people in a state of decline.” 

As of July 2023, just under 227,000 people died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate. It is now abundantly clear that this figure should be added to the death toll over a decade of Tory austerity. Thirteen years of cost-saving initiatives saw nothing short of disastrous outcomes: crumbling schools, prisons and hospitals, 300,000 excess deaths in Great Britain, key services slashed, and crime, deprivation and inequality rising. Now – over half a million are dead due to political decisions to starve the state and its people.

Austerity rewired Britain’s resilience and capabilities. All it took was one national emergency to cause the hollowed-out system to crumble entirely; the killer virus that thrived on health inequalities flourished in Tory-led Britain. 

A new government may be a reason for hope. Labour comes with ideas, competence and policies that may leave the country better off. But austerity is now deeply embedded into the fabric of society, and the government has yet to address how it plans to dig it up at the roots and put an end to its pervasive rot. It promises no spending or tax increases; no fundamental rewiring of the state. 

One thing is certain: at some point, the country will experience another national emergency. Though we do not know when, the report makes clear that without addressing inequalities and underfunding, the government is destined to repeat past mistakes. Labour must learn the lessons of the previous Tory administration. It is time to put an end to austerity once and for all.