29th July 2025
Still Digging Deeper: The Impact of Austerity on Inequality and Deprivation in the Coalfield Areas
Professor David Etherington (University of Staffordshire) Professor Mia Gray (University of Cambridge) and Professor Lisa Buckner (University of Leeds)
The report argues that the large-scale pit closures, the attack on trade unions and the welfare state by the Thatcher Government in 1984 onwards leave a 40-year legacy of extensive inequality and deprivation. The report focuses on a number of case study areas; Fife and South Lanarkshire (Scotland) Barnsley and Stoke on Trent (England) and Neath/Port Talbot and Merthyr Tydfil (Wales). Funding to local government, childcare, health services will impact significantly on employment support. Overall, public expenditure cuts since 1984 have disproportionately impacted on coalfield and deindustrialised areas of the UK.
We find since 2010, benefit cuts amounting to £32.6 billion have been implemented, and coalfield Local authorities have a combined funding gap in 2025/26 of £447 million.
Common themes and issues relating to the case study areas. We highlight the violent effects of austerity – “Structural violence … describes… social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people.”
Specific impacts can be summarised as follows: • low life expectancy, • widespread poor health, • a low employment rate, • fewer highly qualified residents • high out-of-work benefit claimants • low level and insufficient benefits to ‘make ends meet’, • lack of sustainable jobs • high proportion of families living below ‘the breadline.’ We are concerned that Labour market inequalities have gender, disability, age and ethnicity implications and that needs to be taken into account in the design of services. (For example, as a ‘single group’ women have been the most disproportionately impacted by austerity.)
We recommend and call for an end to austerity, revitalised public services as key to supporting economic growth and an economic plan based on just transition that involves trade unions, workers and communities. In other words not just joining up but a more democratised model.