Years of austerity are now writ large on the UK state | Daily News Byte

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good morning In the UK austerity became politically fraught slowly, then suddenly. To most people, it was not so obvious that the state was spending less in 2015 than in 2010.

But today, whether it is because more people are finding they need private healthcare, or because they are sleeping more rough, or because of the UK’s backlog of asylum applications and the courts, the political costs of further cuts are more apparent.

It’s one of the reasons Jeremy Hunt chose to back down so many of the public spending cuts. As a new FT analysis makes clear, backlogs are the order of the day in most British states. Below are some thoughts on the politics and policy of it all.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb And please send gossip, ideas and feedback withinpolitics@ft.com.

Backlog Britain

UK public services face chronic backlogs in large parts of the public sector, from the courts to the health service to border control, analysis by the FT has found. Here are two charts that will annoy Conservative MPs: Thousands of asylum applications have gone unprocessed.

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Nor can the increase be seen solely as a result of increased demand: although applications have doubled over the past five years, the backlog has quadrupled over the same period.

The good(ish) news here for the Conservatives is that one way to get themselves out of the mess of impossible promises is to make some promises that can actually be delivered. They can promise to successfully process more asylum claims on any given day than new claimants arriving in the UK. The simple task of “meaningfully reducing this backlog” is now a victory!

Add to that a bunch of unhelpful features of the UK system. As Sarah O’Connor said in her column a few months ago, the UK stands alone internationally in not allowing asylum seekers to work. It increases the cost of housing asylum seekers and exacerbates the difficulties of the UK labor market. Here are some quick wins, even if you don’t want to touch things that we know work well overseas but are politically controversial in Westminster, like ID cards.

There is less good news as far as the NHS is concerned, where more than 7mn people are now waiting for non-urgent or alternative treatment. Of course, part of the problem is that a “non-urgent” problem may become more severe and require more intensive care than if it had been dealt with earlier. The crisis in the NHS may also be contributing to the UK’s extremely tight labor market, as John Burn-Murdoch explains here and Delphine Strauss details in a new FT series of reports on health at work.

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The solutions here are not that deep. Things cost money, and things work less well in the absence of funds. The NHS has been deliberately designed not to have so much redundancy – even in periods when the NHS is receiving the same amount as peer countries, for example, it has fewer beds per capita – and so it makes it difficult for it. This absorbs pressures.

You can change how the NHS works to prioritize different things, but if you’re a government seeking re-election in 2024 or early 2025, such measures won’t give you much comfort in the here and now. Jeremy Hunt The review into NHS efficiency is a good step in policy terms, but not really one that anyone would expect to make a dent in terms of a political problem.

Of course, the larger political challenge is actually best understood in the context of this chart, which shows the growing wait for children in care to be placed with families.

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No one wants this. We know that, essentially, every child who successfully moves from state local authority care into a family has better life chances and, ironically, costs the state far less in the long run.

Why did it happen? Well, because we had a long period in which the government was trying to cut spending but there was really no sophisticated plan to shrink the state. There is no grand intellectual principle you can apply to the funding the Conservatives have had or stopped since 2010. Instead, there is an electoral principle of cutting state spending, which has led to many cuts. Local Govt.

Now there are two schools of thought broadly within the Tory Party on this. First, best embodied by Cammy Badenoch, who ran for the Conservative leadership before eventually backing Rishi Sunak, is that the problem is that the UK state is still doing things it shouldn’t be doing. But instead of retreating from whole areas it’s doing a lot of things incredibly badly.

Second, as best embodied by Jeremy Hunt, who ran for the Conservative leadership before endorsing Rishi Sunak, there are really good electoral reasons for why the Conservative Party does these things and for the party to prioritize getting big-ticket health items. is needed. And as much teaching work as possible if it is going to survive and thrive.

Readers with good memories don’t have to guess which of these ideas I think is right: it’s Jeremy Hunt. But if the Tories lose the next election, no one inside the Conservative Party will get much hearing for the idea that things would have been worse had it not been for Hunt’s autumn statement. Badenochism, for lack of a better word, will be the high ideology in the party, unless Rishi Sunak surprises almost everyone in Westminster by winning the next election.

Try this now

i saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery In cinemas this weekend. That was fine: I enjoyed it, as did most people who watched it in a crowded cinema. It wasn’t that close anyway Knives outBut as a pleasant-but-forgettable sequel it wasn’t too bad.

Given how well the original did in cinemas in 2019, given how well the original did in cinemas in 2019, and it’s a very entertaining flick best enjoyed on the big screen in the company of a large audience, it seems a bit of a shame that Netflix banned it. Very low number of screenings. I can’t say that I think it’s really worth watching at home, at least not when it’s original Knives out Also on Netflix.

Today’s top stories

• Fuel for thought | Rishi Sunak has commissioned an £18mn information campaign to persuade Britons to save energy ahead of the cold winter months. Technical advice includes measures such as draft-proofing windows, turning off radiators in empty rooms and reducing boiler temperatures.

• The home-buying cooldown is spreading | UK housing demand has almost halved in the wake of Liz Truss’ September “mini” budget, as house hunters have responded to higher mortgage rates by scrapping plans to buy and turning to the rental market instead.

• Shanghai police ‘beat’ BBC journalist | BBC journalist and camera operator Ed Lawrence was “hit and kicked” during an arrest after trying to film an anti-lockdown protest in Shanghai at the weekend, the broadcaster said in a statement today.

• Outbreak at Menston | Concerns have been raised about the spread of diphtheria among Channel migrants after reports of dozens coming down with the highly contagious disease after being held at Manston detention center in Kent.

• Rainer: Time to ‘come clean’ | UK ministers will this week face questions from the opposition Labor Party about the fitness of PPE Medpro – a company linked to Tory peer Baroness Michelle Money – to win major public contracts and its tax record.