Just under a fortnight ago, my working day began at 6.45am, on a silent cul-de-sac near Bury, in Greater Manchester. I was there to shadow Julia, a domiciliary care worker, on her daily morning rounds. She was about to let herself into the home of a 93-year-old woman. “She’ll be asleep in bed,” Julia told me. In 30 packed minutes, she had to wake her up, get her dressed, deal with any overnight accidents and mishaps, make her breakfast and “have a good chat with her, and get her communicating”.
Julia was in the middle of a seven-day working week, with between 10 and 15 “clients” to look after on each shift: elderly people, mostly, but also a 42-year-old mum of two recovering from a stroke. And as we drove from house to house, she explained the tension that runs through her working life: between the squeezed budgets that dictate how she does her job, and the profoundly human needs that she has to see to.
In all our conversations, a few key themes were present. Bury council, like so many local authorities, is in dire straits. Just over a year ago, it declared that it was in a state of “financial distress”, and there are no signs of anything improving. Its care spending is impossibly stretched; the people who deliver such a vital service are usually paid £12 an hour, and their workloads are mind-boggling. Spreadsheets drawn up by local bureaucrats dictate the quickfire schedules that have to be followed, and the few moments when care workers can find time for meaningful human contact.
To cap it all, with the start of a new financial year, the company Julia works for is about to be hit by Rachel Reeves’s rise in employers’ national insurance contributions. Only last week, Labour voted down Liberal Democrat amendments to the relevant legislation aimed at exempting hospices, GP surgeries and care providers from the increase, so a huge jump in costs is about to hit all those services. In Bury, as with lots of other places, that might push the kind of work Julia does to breaking point.
In the early afternoon, I paid a visit to the offices of Homecare Services, the company that employs her, and spoke to Leanne, one of its managers. In its two-room offices in the centre of the town of Ramsbottom, there was a palpable sense of emergency. “Our accountants are looking to see how long we can hold on for before we have to say enough’s enough, and give notice to the local authority,” she said. “There’s only so long you can pay the wages if you’re not getting the funding.” She paused. “The social care sector will break … it’ll maybe sustain [itself] for a matter of months before people close down.”
We were a long way from Whitehall, but it was clear how decisions made in the all-powerful Treasury are playing out in people’s everyday lives. As usual, reports about this week’s spring financial statement and the likelihood of even more bad news have centred on Reeves’s fiscal rules and predictions made by the Office for Budget Responsibility, but there is a much more human story woven into everything. In the real world, mounting numbers of people are simply scared. Many are also baffled about why ministers are constantly averting their eyes from the human costs of their decisions.
Since the cutting of pensioners’ winter fuel payments last year, the government has developed a habit of behaving like that. Senior Labour people no longer speak the language of hope, or even reassurance. Increasingly, this feels like an administration that exists to enforce fiscal orthodoxy and issue bureaucratic edicts framed by abstractions: “tough decisions”, the need to “kickstart the economy” and an all-consuming quest to “bring stability to the public finances”.
Which brings us to a story that began to boil over when I got back from that social care trip: all those proposed cuts in disability and sickness benefits. Last week, I spoke to someone from the National Autistic Society about what the much-reported “tightening” of people’s eligibility for personal independence payments (Pip) would mean for the daily living component of the benefit, which is one of those about to be hacked back.
Here, once again, was a story about complicated human lives being subject to metrics so cold and impersonal that they look almost absurd. When they are assessed, people are given a series of marks between zero and 12 for their ability to do things summarised in so-called descriptors, such as “can prepare and cook a simple meal” or “needs to use an aid or appliance to be able to wash or bathe”. In the current system – and how surreally bureaucratic is this? – a minimum score of eight entitles people to the lower rate of £72.65 a week, while a total score of 12 or over entails the higher weekly rate of £108.55.
But not any more, if the government gets its way. To quote from the new benefits green paper, “only those who score a minimum of four points in at least one daily living activity will be eligible for the daily living component of Pip”. What that ignores is people with more nuanced needs whose deficits and impairments nonetheless amount to something real and debilitating, which is often true of learning disabilities or autism. We have ended up, in other words, with a redefinition of disability completely driven by the need to save cash.
When the Tories were in charge, there was a clear narrative about their brand of austerity, and how awfully they treated so many vulnerable people: it was to do with the cruelties and ignorance that come with privilege. Now Labour is in power, the story has changed: there is a clear sense of Labour being the party of bureaucrats and bean counters, still clinging to the old statist idea that society’s complexities can be captured in statistics, and policy should be all about technocratic efficiency and competence. We can now see the results of that thinking: a profoundly unempathetic style of government, disconnected from the messiness and complexity of real life.
Given that there is a lot of talk about changes to special educational needs provision and reform plans for the NHS, we should worry about what the government might focus on next. Equally alarming, it seems to me, is a belief in Downing Street that reviving the UK demands embracing the wonders of artificial intelligence, which Keir Starmer believes will have an almost magical effect on everything from social work to education, and realise his new dream of “totally rewiring government”. Because this is an administration so lacking in everyday humanity, that is a much more scary prospect than he and his colleagues seem to realise.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
John Harris’s new book, Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in 10 Songs, is published this Thursday. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
