Introduction: austerity and the shrinking state

In the early days of the Coalition government's deficit reduction measures many thought that these would be merely temporary and that once government had succeeded in getting the nation's finances into surplus (initially intended by former Chancellor Osborne to have been achieved by 2015) and after much needed efficiencies had been achieved, hard-pressed public services would once again receive the financial support needed to at least sustain their most socially important elements, such as family legal aid, child and adolescent mental health services and so on. But gradually, as the extent of the cuts in public welfare provision began to take effect, it began to the realised that, as Farnsworth and Irving point out:

For example, because the Ministry of Justice had to reduce its budget by 25% or more, many family court officials whose courts were closed or merged lost their jobs or were transferred. So the capital of their professional experience was lost. Likewise, many family solicitors forced out of the field by cuts in civil legal aid and by market forces took with them knowledge and experience which may be lost to public service forever. It is true that some solicitors retrained as mediators or in some other way found outlets for their skills in the private sector. But a public service system which had taken years to build up was suddenly structurally damaged. In its place, as Michael Gove, a former Minister of Justice in the Cameron Conservative government, recognised on taking office, a two-tier system of justice has emerged: one for high net worth families and the other for the rest of society. Salvaging the valuable remnants of the previous system may take years to reconstruct in a new and effective way, for example, in respect to ideas about the secondary prevention support role of Cafcass in a restructured family justice system (which I outlined in Chapter Eleven).

So the questions arise: how permanent are recent austerity measures likely to be? Will they, as many suspect, lead to a major reconfiguration of public services?