In Britain, Austerity Causes Hardship

PRESCOT, England — A walk through this town in the northwest of England is a tour of the casualties of Britain’s age of austerity. The old library has been sold and refashioned into a luxury home. The leisure center has been razed, eliminating the public swimming pool. The local museum has receded into town history. The police station has been shuttered.

Now Browns Field, a lush park in the center of town, may be doomed, too. The council included it on a list of 17 parks to sell to developers. “Everybody uses this park,” says Jackie Lewis, who raised two children in a house a block away. “This is probably our last piece of community space. It’s been one after the other. You just end up despondent.”

In the eight years since London began cutting support for local governments, the borough of Knowsley, outside of Liverpool, has seen its budget cut in half. Liverpool itself has suffered a nearly two-thirds cut. Communities in much of Britain have seen similar losses.

For a nation with a history of public largess, the campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by the Conservative Party- led government, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. Many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.

By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $ 36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.

Austerity measures were imposed