The ‘austerity decade’ between 2010 and 2020 was a unique period in British economic, political and social history. Prior to that, public spending had continued to grow steadily with the development of the state's role in protecting and promoting the well-being of its citizens, albeit with periodic reining in during economic crises. Even in the Thatcher government, the cuts were borne most by capital expenditure, notably, housing investment, rather than day-to-day spending on services.

The austerity programme introduced by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2010 represented a sharp reversal of that trend. It was born out of the financial crisis of 2008 – essentially a banking crisis – the cost of responding to which had seriously impacted the country's finances. This was common to most developed nations but was particularly significant in the UK due to the high proportion the financial services sector made up of its economy.

For the then Chancellor George Osborne, austerity was both a political and an economic agenda. The sense of crisis and urgency created – we had ‘maxed out’ on our credit cards and were heading towards becoming another Greece – served to underline a political argument that the previous Labour government had left the country in a financial mess and were not to be trusted on the economy. The reality was more complex than this, of course, but the political argument stuck.

There is an irony that, ten years on, the need to respond to another global crisis – this time, a health one – has resulted in ballooning deficits and total debt exceeding £2 trillion, compared to £1.2 trillion in 2010. Austerity temporarily reduced the rate of growth of our debt rather than paying it down.

The economic impact of austerity was arguably self defeating. In a period when demand and confidence in the global economy was low, severely reducing public spending simultaneously across the developed world added to the challenge of low growth and reduced government revenues. The ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ vaunted by the Chancellor turned out to be a recipe for economic stagnation and led to an easing of austerity and an extension of the timescales to reduce the deficit.

Some, including former Prime Minister David Cameron, have argued that the scale of the spending reductions was not that great and the impact of austerity has been overstated.