In the summer, the only holiday they could afford was camping in the grounds of the school where Rob was caretaker. Emma and Rob did all the striving and aspiring the prime minister had called for, hoping to save for a deposit, but never quite making enough. They were sometimes living without a functioning boiler all winter long. With her husband, Rob, and three children, the family moved from one rented home to another, changing the children’s schools as rents rose, roofs leaked. We followed the fortunes of Emma Percy, in Folkestone, Kent. For a new investigation, to assess the extent of the past decade’s damage, we went back to the people we talked to then to see how they have fared since and the hidden ways that austerity has affected their lives. In our 2010 book The Verdict, we evaluated the Blair-Brown era, years of marked social progress. The gap between rich and poor has widened the young are now worse off than their parents at their age home ownership has declined steeply – families are stuck in life-long and precarious private renting. It is no surprise that debt is mountainous: each household owes on average £15,385, not counting their mortgages. But these new jobs paid badly and it took until two months ago for earnings to reach where they were before 2008. In the aftermath of the crash, employment climbed and stayed remarkably high. We should never stop reminding ourselves just what an astonishing decade we have lived through. The exact social consequences of these cuts were spelled out last week in Michael Marmot’s report for the Institute of Health Equity: for the first time in a century, life expectancy has stopped growing and for women in poor areas actually fallen. David Cameron’s Conservatives, only just victorious in the 2010 election, sold austerity as a necessary response to the 2008 financial crash. W hat happened in the UK between 20 will scar us for the rest of our lives.
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