You’ve read the headlines about the council services facing death by a thousand cuts, from nursery schools to libraries and community transport for disabled school pupils. After a real-terms cut of 40% in core government grants since 2010, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) says we are now at the point where councils are “close to the brink” of insolvency. If further proof were needed, look over to Surrey and its council tax referendum, where a council is effectively admitting to voters it can no longer afford to help elderly residents get dressed, or to keep learning disabled adults safe. This is only the beginning. Local government is estimated to be facing a funding black hole of £5.8bn by 2020. If there is any doubt about the brutal impact of these cuts on the ground, just take a look at Sunderland, which is likely to become the only major city in the UK with no refuges for domestic violence victims.

For the past 35 years, Claire Phillipson, director of Wearside Women in Need (WWN) – a local non-profit organisation that runs four safe houses and multiple support programmes across Sunderland – has been on the frontline of domestic abuse services in the area. She has witnessed firsthand over decades the progress that’s been made: from the 1980s when police refused to come out to women attacked by their partners and victims had nowhere to go, to today when police work side by side with her staff to help women in specialist refuges. But just as she is nearing retirement, Phillipson says she’s watching “everything be unravelled”.

When WWN’s latest contract with Sunderland council ends in June, she’s been told its £568,000 annual grant will be pulled. That means zero funding for Sunderland’s refuge. Or the refuge that supports black and minority ethnic or older women. Or their 24-hour helpline. Less a budget cut, more a total destruction.

Some 1,600 women a year rely on WWN’s services. “That doesn’t include the children,” Phillipson adds. Before she met the council at the end of last year, she had no idea it was considering stopping all funding. “No one would expect it,” she says. “We’ve already been cut to the bone.”

Since 2010, WWN has already had its budget cut by a third. Specialist services for children escaping domestic violence were the first thing to go. Next, the programme supporting vulnerable homeless women. Then a residential project for abuse victims with mental health problems. There were 53 trained staff. Now there are 36.

Unless Phillipson is told that the funding will be protected, it will mean closed signs on Sunderland’s refuge doors

Sunderland council denies there won’t be a service helping the victims of domestic violence after June 2017, but in the face of unprecedented budget pressures it says many services have to be “reviewed, refreshed and reorganised”. No final decision has actually been made on its budget for next year, it adds, and it’s continuing to consult on the issue, while making a bid (along with other north-eastern councils and partners) to a central government domestic abuse fund.

Yet, unless Phillipson is told soon that the funding will be protected, it will mean closed signs on Sunderland’s refuge doors. “We’ll have to start telling women in the refuges,” she says.

It would be convenient for Westminster politicians to believe such conversations would have nothing to do with them, but the decisions that councils such as Sunderland are having to make are a direct result of central government’s longstanding imposition of austerity.

The great irony of the drive to save money by gutting councils is that, aside from the human cost, economically such a move is counterproductive. WWN brings in half a million pounds each year through rent and fundraising. But take away core funding from the state and that becomes impossible. “Like taking bricks out the wall and the house falling down,” as Phillipson puts it.

Widen the picture and the hidden costs of not responding to domestic violence get bigger: from the lost taxes of women who can’t go to work because they’ve been isolated by abusers, to the NHS caring for premature babies born early after their mothers are beaten, or the education and benefit system that’s left to deal with children too traumatised to stay in school. Phillipson recently did the housing sums: based on the statutorily homeless women her organisation helped last year alone, if Sunderland’s refuges hadn’t existed, it would have cost the council £1m to house them all in B&Bs.

As it is, austerity is essentially governance in panic mode. When the screws have been tightened on councils by central government, anything can go. At best, it leads to bids to deliver specialist services on a shoestring (“That myth that all you need for domestic violence support is a canny woman with a cup of tea,” Phillipson says). At worst, what used to be automatic markers of a civilised community are now expendable. And with it, so are some of the most vulnerable members of society.

Lately, Phillipson keeps remembering some of the survivors she’s helped over the years, such as one woman in her 70s who adored the beach, only all her married life her husband stopped her from seeing it. With the support of the refuge, she was able to run around in the waves. But what plagues the WWN director is the thought of the women they might not be there for if the refuges close down. “I can’t bear that,” she says.