Thurnscoe in South Yorkshire has a population of 8,500 and a local economy that speaks volumes about modern British history. Until the demise of the coal industry it was a pit village, where 80% of the male workforce earned their living from mining.

Now, on the site of the former Houghton main colliery three miles down the road, there is a vast distribution centre run by the online fashion giant Asos.

Thurnscoe also highlights another modern British story: that of austerity, and the 10 years that have passed since the then chancellor George Osborne stood in House of the Commons, flanked by the Lib Dem coalition ministers Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg, and outlined a drastic emergency budget.

It was 22 June 2010. In the wake of the financial crash, it was time, Osborne said, for “early, determined action”, the majority of which was focused on spending cuts.

Beyond the budgets for the NHS, pre-16 education, defence and international development, government departments were to face an average real-term cut of around 25% over four years. “Everyone will share in the rewards when we succeed,” he said. “When we say that we are all in this together, we mean it.”

Thurnscoe is part of the metropolitan borough of Barnsley. Thanks chiefly to reductions in the money it receives from central government, the borough council lost 33% of its spending power between 2010 and 2019, putting it among the 50 worst-affected local authorities in England. In Tory-run Wokingham in Berkshire the figure was 9.6%.

The results are plain to see in hugely reduced local services. Thousands of local lives have also been changed by cuts to the national benefits system put at £39bn. Hacked-down public transport makes things more difficult, and people’s environment can feel neglected and unkempt. It is difficult to talk about concepts such as aspiration when things feel so fragile and contingent.

But there is also a story about strong community spirit. Volunteers muck in with street cleaning, grass cutting and the maintenance of local parks. The council talks about how much of what it does is now localised, and based more on partnership with people than the idea of services being provided from high. None of this detracts from the gravity of austerity – any mention of David Cameron’s notion of the “big society” is met with derision – but it highlights the fact that the places that have suffered the worst effects of dire cuts are not the hopeless social wastelands of some people’s imagination.

A good example of renewed local endeavour in Thurnscoe is the Station House Community Association. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, it ran playgroups, after-school childcare and holiday provision from 9am until 6pm. At the moment, seven of its eight employees have been furloughed. The only member of staff still at work is its chief executive, Charlotte Williams, a borough resident for 27 years, who makes sure she speaks to the dozens of families on her books at least once a week.

The first thing she talks about is cuts to local bus services and how difficult they make life for shift workers, before she turns to Thurnscoe’s former Sure Start children’s centre. “It used to be open long hours, and you could access a whole range of services,” she says. “But it’s no longer a place where you can get childcare that would allow you to go to work. They used to have a load of outreach programmes, stay-and-play sessions and baby massage and all that. Some of that still exists, but there’s far less of it, and it tends to be much more targeted now.

“Before the cuts, anyone could go in and access those things. Now it’s more like if you tick a certain amount of boxes, you’ll start getting some input. It’s almost like ‘We’re waiting for you to fail, and then we’ll try and build you back up.’ Before, you could get the help you needed when you needed it. Everything feels very wobbly. That causes a nervousness in communities.”

‘The poorest kids lose out’

There is a bitter irony to Barnsley’s recent political history. At the 2019 election, the Conservatives won Penistone and Stocksbridge, a seat partly inside the borough, from Labour. In the constituency of Barnsley Central, Labour’s Dan Jarvis, who is now also the mayor of the Sheffield city region, watched as his share of the vote fell by 23 percentage points, largely thanks to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. Barnsley nonetheless remains a place with a strong historical connection to the Labour, and the party has run the borough council since its creation in 1973.

The leader of Barnsley council for 24 years has been Stephen Houghton. He places what has happened to Barnsley in the context of other historical events, not least the miners’ strike of 1984-5. The headquarters of what remains of the National Union of Mineworkers is in Barnsley. The home of Arthur Scargill, who led the strike to defeat, is just down the road. When the NUM was beaten, it opened the way for deep changes to society and the state. These arguably reached their peak in the coalition years when, Houghton says, austerity “wasn’t just about numbers. It was philosophical. ‘The state is too big.’”

He and his colleagues began planning for cuts in 2008. “We could see the writing on the wall because of the scale of the crash, and the government bailout. I think everybody thought we were likely to get a Tory government, which would be even harder. It didn’t become just about making cuts to balance the books. We said, ‘The way we do things has got to have a complete rethink.’”

The council now does a lot of its work through six “area councils” that administer services with a more local focus, and 21 “ward alliances” that coordinate such services as the cleaning of parks and streets with the aid of local volunteers. “In the past we’d been like most Labour councils,” Houghton says. “Very paternalistic, ‘We’re here to look after you.’ Suddenly our job became about helping you to look after yourselves.”

The borough council guards its social care services for adults and children, which consume over 60% of its budget. The need for child protection work, in particular, is increasing. “Cuts in benefits drive families into despair, and these families have got kids you have to look after. We were reducing things like children’s centres, so the support network that was there for families has been cut. You think you’re making a saving – or the government thinks it is – but it’s just pushed into something else.”

Council-run children’s centres have, to use the official vernacular, been “reconfigured”. Nineteen once offered a full range of services, but now only six do. “We still provide a service, but it isn’t what it used to be. And these are deprived communities that really need that early years help. It’s the poorest kids who lose out, isn’t it?”

Youth work goes on partly via voluntary groups, but all the borough’s council-owned centres have closed. Street cleaning, highway maintenance and parks budgets have all been substantially reduced.

All but two of Barnsley’s libraries have stayed open, but many run on reduced hours and the mobile service has been axed. Council tax has been repeatedly put up, and the council’s workforce has been reduced from around 4,500 to 2,300.

“Just a general lowering of service provision is hard,” says Houghton. “The place starts to look tired and decayed. Psychologically, the general population gets into a place where it’s like, ‘Nothing good ever happens and there isn’t much future.’ That isn’t how you’re going to change the nature of communities and move them on.”

Just before the Covid-19 outbreak, the council was developing new spending plans. “For example, there are some areas in children’s services we were going to improve, around early years. That’ll probably have to stop,” says Houghton. “What Covid means is, we’re back to austerity again.”

He and his colleagues now face an in-year financial gap of £23m. “But we worry more about 2021-22 than we do about this year. You’ve got to plug that gap, or we’re going to start cutting again. I think the government will come up with some money, but I don’t think they’ll fully cover it.”

Making something out of nothing

“How do you get people into jobs?” Houghton asks. “You can pay them more and encourage them. Or you can cut their benefits and drive them into work, but they’ll still be in poverty.”

In Royston, just to the north of the town centre, Nichola Smith is the headteacher of Meadstead primary school, one of nearly 60 schools across England run by the Academies Enterprise Trust. Her school seems to have avoided the financial squeeze that has recently affected swathes of education, but she says money remains very tight. “Sometimes we can only do what we can do with what we’ve got, and I’ve got quite unique staff who are good at making something out of nothing.”

The school has an across-the-board breakfast programme funded by outside donors, who are also involved in providing other help for families in precarious circumstances: grants for those unable to afford fridges or washing machines, assistance with buying school uniforms and food parcels.

“The parents who were just about managing are now not managing, because universal credit’s not the same as the benefits they were getting before. That’s the biggest thing that’s hit my families,” Smith says.

People’s problems have become even more acute since the onset of the pandemic. For those in low-paid jobs, the effective 20% pay cut resulting from the government’s furlough scheme represents an often impossible loss of income. Tellingly, Smith and her staff are now offering families internet dongles to ensure they can get online. “A lot of parents will say, ‘We’ve had to get rid of the internet because we can’t afford it.’”

Such stories seem impossibly bleak, but conversations about Barnsley also include descriptions of a place that has started to recover some of its confidence, even in the hardest of times. A new town centre “community hub” and library called the Lightbox opened last year. A lot of people also talk about Experience Barnsley, a new museum and “discovery centre” that opened in 2013 just as the cuts were reaching their nadir.

Run by the council and housed in the town hall, its collection is based on objects and stories supplied by the people of Barnsley themselves. Most of its £4m starting costs came from the heritage lottery fund and the EU.

The poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan, who was born in Barnsley and lives four miles from the town centre, currently serves as the museum’s “poet in lockdown”. This entails writing a sonnet every Thursday, which is then posted on social media. “At the time, you thought, ‘Here’s a place where things are shutting down everywhere, and a museum is actually opening,’” he says. “It felt counterintuitive, like swimming against some kind of tide.”

Nonetheless, his experience of his home town over the last decade has been coloured by the sadness that austerity brought. “You notice things kind of vanishing off the edge,” he says. ‘Where did that go, that community centre?’ Things disappear, and that becomes the norm. You notice weeds, and grass not being cut so often. It’s like mood music, but all in a minor key.”