“It’s morally and ethically bankrupt as a strategy.” That’s the assessment of Salford’s Labour mayor, Paul Dennett, on the decimation of local authorities: a summary that is impossible to disagree with. Since the Tory government’s imposition of austerity a decade ago, councils have lost about half of their central government funding. As supposed compensation, they have been allowed to keep more of their own revenue. Planned changes may give prosperous areas a huge advantage over poorer communities by allowing them to raise more money through council tax and business rates, while having fewer social needs. Consider what has already happened: according to a report commissioned by the Lloyds Bank Foundation, almost all the reduction in spending on disadvantaged people has been in the most deprived fifth of local authorities in England.

Communities were pummelled by Thatcherite deindustrialisation; now another Tory government is back wreaking social chaos

According to Newcastle’s council leader, Nick Forbes, his local authority will lose the equivalent of £268 per household by 2020. In relatively affluent, Tory-held Wokingham, the cut will be just £2. That leaves Newcastle with similar spending power as Wokingham, even though it has four times as many looked-after children and three times as many adults receiving social care. As Forbes puts it to me, if Newcastle wanted to counter the funding collapse by increasing council tax by 1%, it would raise about £1m. The same rise in leafy Surrey might expect to bring in more than £13m. Even worse, the government changed the funding formula for distributing central funds to local councils: for example, taking out funding for students and weighting for deprivation. This so-called “fair” funding formula doesn’t reflect the level of social need in an area.

Poorer communities were pummelled by Thatcherite deindustrialisation and left scarred by consequent social problems; now another Tory government is wreaking more social chaos. Take Salford, which is in the top 5% most deprived councils, and where rough sleeping has surged by 600% in the last five years. The causes are clear: cuts to council housing, benefits and council budgets. According to the new report, nearly half of spending on preventing homelessness has gone in favour of a 56% rise in spending on homelessness support. “Local government is only making ends meet by robbing Peter to pay Paul,” explains the Lloyds Bank Foundation’s policy director, Duncan Shrubsole. “They’re now at a tipping point. If you’re having to cut preventative funding, to stop someone being homeless in the first place, to put more money into crisis – well, you can’t keep doing that.” Indeed, councils are forced into a grim competition of needs. Across the country, growing hardship has led to a massive surge in demand for children’s services, which are ringfenced by law: in Salford, that led to an unexpected £4 million overspend, which then has to be subtracted from other budgets. In Salford, Dennett says the demand for services is just increasing: rough sleeping, food banks, children moving into care, domestic violence and abuse, rising crime. He says: “All are happening directly because of austerity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Labour-run Preston is fighting back by encouraging all public sector organisations in the city to invest and buy locally.’ Photograph: Alamy

This is an all too ignored, growing social crisis enveloping the lives of the most vulnerable and least heard people. The new report is titled A Quiet Crisis, but people are bellowing about it across the country: they’re just not being listened to. Brexit is sucking all oxygen from the national conversation, sidelining the injustices that fuelled the referendum result in the first place. But a media all too willing to reduce politics to tittle-tattle and a Westminster soap opera must also accept responsibility. The Tory chairman of the Local Government Association, Gary Porter, has said that unless austerity ends: “We won’t be cleaning the streets, we won’t be cutting the grass, we won’t be putting street lights on at all, your libraries will go, your potholes won’t get filled up.” If a Conservative can so powerfully hold the government to account, why not our national media?

Almost all cuts to social care in England are in the poorest areas Read more

There may not be an opportunity to turf the Tories out of office for another four years: these increasingly devastated communities cannot wait that long. As one senior local figure tells me, there is frustration among certain council leaders at the failure of the LGA Labour group to coordinate a strategy to fight back. A statement being released later this week, which organisers hope will be signed by leaders across party lines, speaks of the “catastrophic impact” of local government austerity, the violation of the “social contract between citizen and state”, and warns of impending “infrastructural and social collapse”. Its demands are inarguable: central government funding for councils should be needs-based, rather than forcing councils to rely on what they can raise through local tax. A national campaign focusing on this ignored crisis – with days of action and community mobilisation – must surely follow. There are successful counterattacks, too: Labour-run Preston is fighting back by encouraging all public sector organisations in the city to invest and buy locally. “We’ve got to make the case that austerity is anti-democratic,” its leader, Matt Brown, tells me. “To make political choices, you need money, after all.”

It’s a national scandal that the Tories look after their own affluent communities while leaving struggling Labour-run communities to bleed. It’s nothing less than naked class war. Like any war, there are casualties: from the homeless to damaged childhoods to women fleeing male violence. The silence must surely end.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist