From the dramatic rise of food banks to the drastic withdrawal of benefits, our writers assess how the coalition's austerity measures have left millions of households across Britain struggling to survive

Patrick Butler: Retreat of the welfare state



A new wave of poverty crashed over the voluntary sector. Food banks, almost entirely dependent on volunteers and donated food, grew rapidly to try to take the strain caused by low wages, rising living costs, and benefit cuts and delays. Demand surged after April, when welfare changes started to take substantial chunks from the incomes of the poorest, many of them ill and disabled.

Breakfast clubs, clothes banks, and even "baby banks" also sprang up as in-kind support began to replace dwindling welfare cash entitlements.

Poverty charities organised ever-bigger national food drives with large supermarkets for food banks to give out. This was a charitable food effort not seen since the second world war. Police reported a rise in shoplifting of groceries, often by mothers desperate to prevent their children from going hungry. Doctors declared that food poverty was now a "public health emergency".

The Department for Work and Pensions refused to admit there was any evidence of a link between welfare reform and food bank use.

Charities told tales of injustice, fear and humiliation endured by the most vulnerable, as a result of increased benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and the Atos-run fit-for-work tests. The "heat or eat" dilemma slipped into the public consciousness. The church rediscovered its campaigning heart on debt and payday lending.

Corrosive cuts to charities and community groups continued. There were veiled political threats to campaigning charities through the lobbying bill. The big society may not be dead, argued a recent audit, but it was healthiest as a form of reactive crisis voluntarism. The outlook was far less rosy for small charities reliant on state funding to supply specialist welfare services in deprived areas; they, the audit concluded, were "left out in the cold", their future increasingly bleak.

Amelia Gentleman: Disabled people bear the brunt of cuts

This has been a year of exceptional uncertainty for recipients of disability benefits, as new payments were introduced and eligibility criteria narrowed. Anger about some of the new policies triggered successful protest campaigns.

Two-thirds of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced in April, were disabled – and many subsequently found themselves obliged to pay extra for rooms where carers sleep and specialist equipment is stored. A survey revealed that 90% of disabled people affected by the bedroom tax, who hadn't received a safety-net payment, were cutting back on food bills.

Two ongoing legal reviews criticised the government. Three charities that support people with mental health problems pursued a judicial review of the work capability assessment (WCA) the fitness for work test used to determine whether hundreds of thousands of disabled people are eligible for benefits. Judges in a preliminary hearing agreed that the system was unfair for some of the most vulnerable people in society. The charities called for the testing process to be halted, until the test was fairer.

Meanwhile, five disabled people won their case to overturn the government's abolition of the £330m independent living fund.

Delays in paying the personal independence payment (which replaces the disability living allowance) to people with terminal illnesses meant hundreds of very ill cancer patients faced months without money, and some died before they received the benefit. The new disability minister, Mike Penning, promised the system would improve.

Grassroots campaigners set up the War on Welfare (Wow) petition, and gathered 100,000 signatures calling for an end to the WCA and demanding a cumulative impact assessment on all cuts and changes affecting disabled people, their families and their carers. Comedian and Wow campaigner Francesca Martinez said the campaign was "beginning to challenge this idea that disabled people are scroungers".

Randeep Ramesh: Young people losing out

When the OECD warned that England was the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the youngest adults, it was a stark reminder of a rift emerging between the old and young. Politicians begin to recognise that, for the first time since the war, young Britons embarking on their careers cannot expect to be any better off than their parents, while those approaching retirement have never had it so good. The prime minister's response was to tough it out. In his party conference speech, he made it clear that Britain would only be a "land of opportunity" if young people understood the only choice was "between earning or learning".

The direction of Tory party policy was that under-25s will lose the right to housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance. By comparison, benefits for over-64s consume £111bn (55%) of the £202bn welfare budget. While welfare reform bites into young people's incomes, elderly people keep their bus passes and winter fuel payments, and are granted exemptions from cuts to housing and council tax rebates.

What is shocking is that the link between growth and jobs for young people has been broken. The jobless rate among under-25s is now 3.74 times the adult rate.

More than 950,000 young people are now unemployed and almost a third (30% ) have been looking for work for more than a year. Yet the government's flagship Work Programme, undertaken mainly by private sector contractors, is failing to deliver. In the second year, providers were expected to get a third of young people into sustained employment. This was met in only 18 out of 40 contracts. The problem is that often the coalition's tough-love policy – of mandatory schemes involving work experience and community activity – doesn't work. Academics point out that the strictest schemes are less likely to work, largely because they can deter people from claiming benefit without improving their chances of finding employment. It may be time to change.

Hannah Fearn: Bedroom tax and benefit cap hits home

An inauspicious year for housing was ushered in by the much-maligned bedroom tax, a cut in housing benefit for each bedroom that a social tenant under-occupies. The divisive policy led to a number of legal challenges. A £500-a-week cap on all benefits as private sector rents soar is having a devastating impact. Across London and some other cities, private tenants claiming housing benefit to pay their rent are unable to find anywhere to live within the cap level, and landlords are refusing to rent to benefit claimants, most of whom are working. In parts of the capital, housing benefit no longer even covers the cost of "affordable rent" charged by social landlords. As a result, households are being shunted out of London to cheaper cities as far away as Hull and Stoke-on-Trent, leaving their communities behind. The government stands accused of presiding over the end of social housing and a huge rise in homelessness. More than 2,000 homeless families with children were in emergency bed and breakfast accommodation on 30 September, the highest figure for a decade.

Two important milestones: councils no longer have a duty to house homeless people in social housing, offering an unregulated private tenancy instead, taking us back to Cathy Come Home-style housing for poor families; meanwhile, housing associations are moving into private rent, in a bid to house the priced-out younger generation.

Tom Clark: Welfare reforms unravel

At the start of the year, many people thought Iain Duncan Smith's heart was in the right place; at its end, there is alarm that his head is in the wrong place. The declining stock of the welfare secretary, laid bare in a woeful Commons performance last week, is part of the wider story of 2013. After two dismaying years, during which the right has made all the running on social security – presenting benefit payments as something that saps the moral strength of recipients – we have moved from lofty welfare theory, to messy welfare facts. Three years after some of us warned the council tax benefit "reform" risked bringing back damaging elements of the poll tax, town halls are indeed embroiled in chasing the poorest people through the criminal courts for trivial sums. Two years after campaigners warned parliamentarians not to sign off on a vague commitment to save big money from disability living allowance before the government had come clean about who would lose out, it has emerged that the government was itself unclear about what it is trying to do, and the reassessment process has been delayed.

Then there is universal credit, which IDS has until now successfully sold as a universal answer. Eighteen months ago, I wrote that Whitehall officials made a "nervous sucking sound" whenever asked about UC, and reported ministers were taking little interest in the nuts and bolts of delivery. Right up until this month's autumn statement, when IDS seized the chance to bury bad news, the great overhaul was officially tickety-boo. Now, amid IT failures, he is left relying on sophistic distinctions between "write-offs" and "write downs" to salvage his reputation. Worse, the new UC timetable – which involves moving millions on to the new system in a brief period in 2016/17 – looks fraught. This might be the first year in which competence has moved centre stage in the welfare debate, but it will not be the last.

David Brindle: Fewer adults receive care and support



This was the year when the cuts began to bite deep. After three years of doing everything possible to avoid any direct impact on older and disabled people, plundering other departments first and screwing every penny out of overheads, councils started to run out of options. Almost one in three social services directors in England acknowledged that cuts this year would mean fewer people getting care and support. More than one in 10 admitted to withdrawing services from people already getting them. Budgets are already 20% lower than in 2010. Although services have for years been focused increasingly on fewer people with greater needs – 25% fewer people received care at home in 2012 than in 2007 – analysts say the difference now is that the overall volume of care and support is falling for the first time.

Two related issues sparked controversy: the growing use by councils of home-care visits limited to just 15 minutes; and estimates that as many as 220,000 care workers could be receiving less than the minimum wage because they are not paid for travel time between visits. The former divided opinion; the latter was harder to defend.

One brighter note was the prospect of real progress on integration of social care and health, with the announcement of a £3.8bn joint fund in 2015-16 and selection of 14 pioneer areas to start work immediately. Wales will have its own £50m fund next year and Scotland is legislating on integration, with Highland council and NHS Highland already having come together.

Most important is the political consensus that integration is the only way to cope with the cuts – which will peak in 2015 – and with the long-term outlook of less money for the ageing population's growing needs.

Anne Perkins: Austerity wears a female face

Serious case reviews sabotaged by the Department for Education (DfE), safeguarding shortcomings, a creeping fear of privatisation and an unexpected bouquet from David Cameron at the party conference: children's social workers are used to roller coaster rides, but 2013 has been even more of a white-knuckle affair than usual. Two grim serious case reviews, into the deaths of Daniel Pelka and Hamzah Khan, were swiftly used by politicians as a stick to beat social workers : the DfE minister Edward Timson attacked the inquiry into Hamzah Khan's death despite having originally indicated the findings, which carefully avoided blaming an individual, would be accepted. Then Michael Gove said many social workers were "not up to the job" and backed Frontline, a TeachFirst for social workers, which implied with its express intention of attracting the brightest graduates, that the service was not getting them already.

The closure of children's centres and Sure Start projects added to the pressure on vulnerable parents and increased the demand on social workers at a time when councils were struggling with harsh budget cuts. Birmingham city council, branded a "national disgrace" by the Ofsted chief inspector for its child protection failures, declared its safeguarding services could not be guaranteed. But last week it promised a £10m improvement plan, fending off rumours of privatisation.

The number of children living in absolute poverty rose sharply, according to the first social mobility report. As wages are eroded by inflation, the new trend is for children in working families to be living in poverty.

It was clear from the start that austerity would wear a female face, if only because the shake-out of public sector jobs was likely to hit women harder than men. Now it is becoming clearer that many of the services that were curtailed or lost altogether – children's and Sure Start centres, for example – were of most value to single parents, who tend to be women. The latest sector to report a disproportionate impact is legal aid, where lawyers say that the tightening of conditions for entitlement in cases of domestic violence has led to many vulnerable and at-risk women being excluded. Victims now have to prove they have been abused with hard-to-acquire evidence.

Peter Hetherington: The end of local government

Nowhere has the spending axe bitten more deeply than local government. Sir Albert Bore, Labour leader of Birmingham city council, the biggest council and – arguably – the authority closest to the financial precipice, again warned last week of the end of local government as we know it. Whitehall insiders talk of 30 English councils going bust over the next few years. Even modest attempts to give councils more powers to borrow and build have hit a brick wall. In his autumn statement, the chancellor said he would make an extra £300m available to build more homes. That's a tenth of what senior finance experts believe authorities could safely borrow to build thousands of new homes in co-operation with others.

In this area, as elsewhere, ideology reigns supreme. Authorities will be expected to match this with cash from the sale of high-value council estates in city centres, and equally valuable land. This simply doesn't make sense: forcing councils to sell valuable assets, with valuable rental streams, against which they could borrow and build.

In Scotland, despite the Scottish government's publication of its white paper on independence, there is growing discontent that the constitutional debate sidesteps a fragile local democracy.

Alan Travis: A revolution in criminal justice

The coalition's policy of "permanent revolution" in criminal justice continued apace.

The first year of elected police and crime commissioners was declared, even by the home secretary, Theresa May, to have been "good and bad", with their record in holding their local forces to account being particulary mixed. She did, however, claim that the police service in England and Wales was now a model for the rest of the public sector for its ability to absorb 20% cuts in Whitehall funding by delivering "more for less".

The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, introduced payment-by-results community rehabilitation companies to take over most of the probation service's work against a very tight timetable dictated by the date of the next general election. It has proved far more complicated than Grayling expected and he ended the year insisting the plan was an "evolution and not a revolution". The privatisation programme in the criminal justice system had its biggest setback with the announcement of fraud inquiries into Serco and G4S over the existing tagging contracts.

In the prisons "market", the privatisation of three South Yorkshire prisons, for which Serco was the frontrunner, was ditched. Both Serco and G4S run prisons that are the three worst-performing in England and Wales, but they also run other jails that have been praised by inspectors. Both companies are now major players in criminal justice and it will be very difficult for ministers to press ahead with any privatisation without the involvement of either of them.

Denis Campbell: NHS agenda set by the Francis report

The coalition's radical restructuring of the NHS in England on 1 April turned out not to be the issue of the year. Instead it was Robert Francis's landmark report into Mid Staffs that set the agenda: exposure and intolerance of failure in patient care or safety, with a blizzard of reviews and initiatives to address many of the problems the QC identified, such as tackling endemic understaffing by publishing for the first time details of how many nurses were on duty.

All that has proved very helpful for Jeremy Hunt's self-positioning as the champion of patients, scourge of poor care and bold challenger of NHS vested interests. Unfortunately for him, his rhetoric and decisions have angered and alienated GPs, nurses, NHS managers and others who feel unfairly maligned. Blaming the 2004 GP contract for A&E overcrowding in 2013 persuaded no one.

But Hunt is under pressure because the NHS is under pressure, with A&E being the most visible expression. While he denies there is an A&E crisis in public, two lots of emergency cash, and his calls last month to bosses of hospitals that had missed the 95% target, indicated a health secretary in a state of some anxiety. He has two winters to get through and an election not to lose.

Hunt is proving far more hands-on than he should be in the new system, in which the Department of Health has supposedly devolved operational control to NHS England. That said, he has instigated some necessary reforms, such as a focus on frail elderly people, greater transparency on outcomes and the beginnings of countrywide integration between health and social care.

Jane Dudman: Civil service morale at an all-time low



Public managers face the prospect of cuts that will roll back state spending on public services to the lowest level since 1948. If that were not grim enough, senior civil servants have endured a year of almost constant criticism from ministers that they are "blocking" civil service reform. The former head of the civil service, Lord Butler, decried what he called "backstairs sniping" by Francis Maude, the cabinet office minister. Peter Riddell, head of the Institute for Government thinktank, wrote that many of the permanent secretaries are "nervous, bruised and worried about their tenure".

Bernard Jenkin, chair of the Commons public administration select committee, called for an all-party parliamentary commission to be set up to examine the future of Whitehall. In the meantime, Whitehall leaders want a modern, faster-paced civil service, with greater skills in digital, procurement and project management, as they grapple with having to outsource more and more public services. Of the annual £187bn spent by government, the National Audit Office estimates that half is now contracted out to the private sector, meaning privately delivered public services spend on a par with the NHS.

Amid the turmoil, individual public leaders remain resilient and dedicated, such as Carl Haggerty, Devon county council's digital communications manager, who received the Guardian's Leadership Excellence award. It will be leaders like Haggerty, finding new ways to run services, who may get us through the oncoming avalanche of cuts.