Thousands of publicly funded services across Britain are about to be lost, with devastating consequences
A week today the cuts will start to bite. As the financial year ends, grants will run out, contracts will wind up, and charities and services will begin to shut their doors. After months of anxiety about the impact of the cuts, the consequences of the government's rapid deficit reduction programme will begin to be real.
The Guardian gives a slice of what this will mean across the country, highlighting a cross-section of 50 services that will shrink or cease to exist from the end of this month. Most are unglamorous, obscure, unfeted projects, staffed by employees who are not very well paid, but hugely committed to what they do. All of these losses come as a result of the government's decision to cut spending by £95bn over five years.
Their disappearance may not be noticed by anyone with a good income, in secure employment, in sound health, without caring responsibilities – anyone who does not look to the state for support with life's problems. For the more vulnerable, the decision to close these bodies and cut these jobs will be sharply felt. They will be more acutely obvious beyond the south-east, in areas that are more dependent on government grants. Women, parents, carers, disabled people, teenagers and elderly people are likely to be the most affected.
From a Westminster perspective, they may be easy to ignore. These are not dramatic closures of maternity wards, big events that would inspire fury and noisy protest; instead the process is much smaller, more fragmented in scale, and hardest felt by people who tend not to be particularly powerful or vocal. Mostly, ministers are able to wash their hands of responsibility, dismissing these cuts as local decisions (despite the fact that they originate in central government funding reductions).
Viewed from Downing Street, they probably seem a fractured collection of regrettable but relatively insignificant services, located (conveniently) in greater concentration the further you move from Westminster. But from the service users' perspective, their disappearance will often be catastrophic.
Among the organisations going is the Connexions careers and advice centre in Lewisham, south-east London, one of the country's most deprived neighbourhoods, which has had all its funding cut, triggering the loss of 35 jobs. As a result, teenagers who have not thrived at school and face unemployment will no longer get specialist help.
Also from next week, 600 children with severe learning disabilities, many of them unable to speak, will no longer benefit from music therapy when the Northern Ireland Music Therapy Trust loses its budget. These children have learned to express themselves with the help of percussion instruments, pianos and guitars; the decision will have a "major impact on this already vulnerable and disadvantaged group of people," the charity's director says.
The cuts affect a wide spectrum of projects: youth offending teams will shrink, probation staff numbers will dwindle, refugee advice centres will halve in size, Sure Start services will disappear, domestic violence centres will have to restrict the number of people they can help, HIV-prevention schemes will end, lollipop wardens will no longer be funded, help for women with postnatal depression will vanish, a work scheme for people who are registered blind will be wound down, day centres for street drinkers will close their doors, theatres will get less money, debt advice services will have fewer people available to help, fire stations will shut.
But the services highlighted here represent only a tiny selection of what is just one wave. The full impact of the cuts in public spending will come gradually, and will not be fully tangible for several years, as changes to the welfare system and the NHS, and cuts to housing benefit and police services will be staggered over this parliament.
Reductions to local authority budgets were announced in the comprehensive spending review last October, which is why councils have acted swiftly to cut jobs and services from the beginning of the new financial year. There is much more to come – with libraries, respite centres and nursing homes still waiting to find out if they are to survive – and the process will be protracted, but 1 April will be the key moment when the cuts become visible.
This cross-section of cuts shows how, across the country, local authorities are dispensing with "discretionary services" – extra free childcare, afterschool play schemes, lunch clubs for elderly people, youth clubs – so that from now on they will provide only the bare statutory minimum services, and even these will be whittled down. While councils will continue to support the most needy, people with requirements that are one notch short of urgent will have to fend for themselves.
Council officials have described the paring-back process as heartbreaking and are worried about what the longer-term costs and consequences will be. Youth clubs have quietly prevented anti-social behaviour, day care centres for elderly people have helped users stay out of hospital, after-school play centres have made it easier for women to work. The removal of these services could prove expensive in unexpected ways.
In the context of the government's "big society" agenda, some of these decisions are perplexing. Many of the organisations that will shut are small community groups or local charities which have been supported by central or local government grants to provide important neighbourhood services. The people running them think it unlikely that philanthropists can be found to step in with alternative funding.
The closure of groups like the Northern Ireland Music Therapy Trust illustrate the difficulty of finding alternative sources of income at a time when everyone's budgets are strained. Once organisations close, the damage is instant and long-lasting; the prospect that they can be revived is slim.
Council officials are sceptical about the prospect of local volunteers signing up as part-time, unpaid social workers, rubbish collectors, probation officers or youth offender workers. In any case, there is little confidence that even the most well-intentioned volunteers could provide the same consistent, reliable service that paid employees have given.
The government says most of the cuts to local authority budgets can be met with "efficiency savings", invisible, painless bits of internal restructuring. The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has suggested that cuts can be made by eliminating pointless "non-jobs" and cutting chief executive pay.
But councils have found it hard to identify non-jobs to cut and point out that reducing executive pay makes only a tiny dent in the amount that needs to be cut. They argue that frontline services are so closely interwoven with back-office support functions that it is impossible to provide one without the other.
The Treasury said: "The government's priority is to deal with the deficit. Unless the deficit is tackled, there won't be the economic confidence to support job and wealth creation."
Throughout this period, the government's mantra has been that we should all learn to do more for less. The imminent disappearance of the jobs and services profiled here suggests we will simply end up with less.