Financial Times Team (Sally Gainsbury, Sarah Neville, John Burn-Murdoch)
The Austerity State, Financial Times
We set out to move beyond the emotional claim and counter-claim which has characterised the debate over the impact of government spending cuts. To do this, we carried out an extensive, and ground-breaking, analysis of data from every local authority to measure the effect of the reductions on people’s lives. We discovered how many fewer elderly people were being looked after by social services, how many more homeless children were being accommodated in B&Bs and how much less was being spent on each child at risk of abuse and neglect. To fill what we regarded as a serious gap in public understanding, we then created an interactive feature which automatically detects where the reader is, presenting a personalised snapshot of the story and allowing him or her to discover what has happened to services in their localities over the past five years.
Journalistic Writing
- The Austerity State – 19/07/2015, Financial Times
