This isn’t a story about statistics, but about people.

It is about how swingeing cuts made in Whitehall - to local government, that least glamorous of departments - have played out on the ground, for nearly a decade. About what the numbers on those ministerial spreadsheets actually mean.

When the post-crash council cuts began back in 2010, many of Greater Manchester's communities were already struggling.

Hundreds of miles away from Westminster in Newton Heath, north Manchester, people on Jane Chadfield's estate had formed a new residents' group a few years earlier, concerned their area - one of the poorest in the country - was being neglected, the park left untidy.

Then the council savings began.

One of the first things to go was the Stirling Centre on Scotland Hall Road, wedged next to the local playground, where a meals-on-wheels service and day centre had provided a ‘lifeline’ to the elderly.

“The top and bottom of it was they needed to save money,” says Jane, now 57 and registered disabled, of the council.

“We said ‘we don’t like the fact you’re going to sell it or steel it up and spend a fortune keeping on top of the vandalism’.

“‘We can take it on and try to run some services out of there that the community needs’.”

(Image: Colin Horne - Manchester Evening News)

That was in 2012.

Since the cuts began two years earlier, Manchester council has now slashed £372m, while Jane, her husband and the other volunteers - helped by the odd paid worker - have been plugging more and more of the gaps its services once filled.

‘From birth to 90’, she says, the centre is now relied upon.

“One of our members is 82 or 83 and she still goes round talking to people and bringing me casework, because she cares,” she says.

“That’s how we found out we needed a youth club.

“On a Friday night the young kids were hanging around with the older ones and getting in trouble, so we brought them in and have them something to eat and drink.

“When they’re making trouble, going in supermarkets and nicking stuff or terrorising the corner shop, that can be from nine years upwards. If they weren’t with us, there’s no other provision in the ward on a Friday night.”

The area used to have a PCSO on duty every weekend, she adds, but now it’s one in three.

“Then we found out we needed to feed them toast and juice, because some were hungry.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

“We found kids having seven or eight slices of toast - that was hunger, not greed. You can tell the difference. Which led to the food bank.”

Manchester council’s cuts kept on coming.

The library next-door in Miles Platting was another casualty, replaced by a smaller voluntary community-run version in a hut nearby, its opening days reduced to a couple of days a week. The baths, which had stood on the same site, shut too, the land was left empty. There is now no swimming pool in the ward, with residents instead redirected to a new leisure centre a mile and a half away, a £100,000 a year council saving.

Two council-run youth clubs have closed, on Briscoe Lane and Averill Street, to be taken over, again, by voluntary groups all fighting for the same funding.

That wasn’t even the first thing Jane noticed.

“We lost our environmental health officer straight away,” she says.

“We’d got quite friendly with him - you’d see something and ring him and say ‘can you come and have a quick look at this fly-tipping or a rat infestation?’ Now we’ve got nobody to go to.

“Yeah, the rat man will come out, but in two or three weeks or something stupid.

“With fly tipping, by the time you’ve got through to someone the dogs and cats will have gone through the bags.”

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Newton Heath - while being one of the hardest-hit wards in the city by council closures, as well as one of the most deprived in the country - is far from unique.

Back in 2010, then-communities secretary Eric Pickles took to his cuts brief with zeal.

Six years later, his department had seen harder cuts than any other, two thirds of its funding gone.

Knowing that most people are largely unaware of exactly what it is councils do - dusty, unsexy institutions mainly associated with variable bin collections, unwanted bills and unwarranted parking fines - he was able to slash with fervour and impunity.

And iniquity.

From day one, northern urban councils such as Manchester - and neighbouring boroughs such as Salford and Tameside - saw their grants cut back far faster than those for areas less reliant upon them, such as Surrey. (While Surrey county council’s own borderline bankruptcy was not met exactly with glee by officials here last year, it certainly prompted a grimly-raised eyebrow or two.)

And although this is not an article about statistics, it is still worth a quick recap.

While Oxford has gained £115 of spending per head in council funding since 2010, Salford - an area with a far greater ability to bring in council tax than boroughs here - lost £650 for each person in the city, according to research by Centre for Cities a couple of weeks ago.

As grants were cut across Greater Manchester, councils have had to save a combined total of £1.75bn, moving initially to cut the things they didn’t legally have to provide.

(Image: Google)

Libraries, such as the one in Miles Platting, were among the first things to go, with library spending in Manchester now down by nearly 40pc. When I ring one Bury library now run by volunteers, the recorded message says its all: "This is Bury council. The number you have dialled is unallocated."

As seven out of the ten boroughs cut down their road maintenance spending, pothole complaints rocketed, up 70pc last year alone, according to the Federation of Small Business .

Bin collections are down to once every two or three weeks. Some councils outsourced environmental services to save money, but with contract management capacity stripped out under the cuts and savings targets are sometimes unrealistic, litter often piled up anyway .

Manchester, which initially cut from its homeless budget before the current crisis spiralled, is now having to house ten times more homeless families than four years ago, raiding its reserves for cash .

Other consequences are more private, but just as painful.

Across the river from Manchester in Salford, the council was - and still is - struggling to pay for the soaring cost of placing disabled children in care, its core government grant down by 53pc since 2010.

One result was the closure of what appears to be a nondescript suburban house on Trippier Road in Eccles.

“The Grange gave us... it sounds like a cliche, but it gave us our family back,” says 39-year-old teacher Rebecca Howarth.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Her teenage daughter Rachel, who has severe learning difficulties, was the last to leave the children’s home in November, the result of a long-drawn out attempt by Salford council to save £300,000 a year.

It was the last remaining home for disabled children in the city.

“When Rachel first went to the Grange, we weren’t, as a family, in a good place,” adds Rebecca.

“Having somewhere like that for her was a lifeline, really.

“Her behaviour had been very problematic and it wasn’t a very pleasant environment to be in. Her siblings were struggling with it.

“The psychological effect of them seeing her going through it but not being able to express it - the Grange gave us that respite and breathing space, it put all the pieces back together.”

She was ‘shocked’, she says, when she received a call from a social worker in late 2014.

What followed was a battle: protests, delayed decisions, legal action as Rebecca sought to stop her daughter being moved out of the city to somewhere under a different health authority, somewhere the family would struggle to visit.

In the end, she got Rachel a bungalow in Salford, but only, she believes, because she just wouldn’t let it drop.

“None of us asks to be in that position, but circumstances sometimes are outside your control,” she says of parents with disabled children.

“Now there’s even less funding, I dread to think what it means for families in the places we were in four years ago. You just get told services for disabled children are expensive and that’s how it is. But it’s not our fault.”

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Council cuts were initially the subject of these sorts of fairly specific protests: clusters of placards outside windswept civic centres.

After nearly a decade, however, the effects are getting wider currency as they bleed into more visible patterns.

On the opposite side of Manchester to Salford, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Carl Kelsall’s youth project in Holy Trinity church is more or less the area’s ‘last man standing’, he says.

Since 2010 Tameside council has cut 90pc from its youth services budget. There have been consequences.

One early casualty was the St Peter’s Community Partnership project, originally paid for by government funding through Tameside council.

“When we had that extra money, we managed to reduce anti-social behaviour in the area by 65pc, reduce hate crime by 35pc,” says Carl.

"It's a predominantly white area and a predominantly Asian area and it was about young people growing up with suspicion of each other. When they went into each other's areas, there was conflict.

"We would train up youth workers on both sides of the divide. Some went on to be police officers, one became an architect. We challenged the poverty of ambition.”

When that funding went, the council tried to keep the remains of the project running at a purpose-built hub called the Portland Centre.

But with no cash to pay for it, the centre was sold off.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

What happened next was predictable, Carl believes.

“Low and behold, we have seen an increase in anti-social behaviour and hate crime and social problems,” he says.

"At the same time the bankers were being rewarded with their bonuses, we were being issued with our redundancy notices.”

The M.E.N. has repeatedly reported on youth crimewaves in the area over the last year or so, as well as in many other communities - from Oldham to Blackley to Hyde to Altrincham - across Greater Manchester.

A week ago the home secretary Sajid Javid suggested prevention work was key to cutting rising knife crime. In a borough where council youth workers have been cut from 100 to 10, the frustration is palpable.

Something darker has also taken hold, too, says Carl.

"I hear people blaming each other for how sh*t their lives are,” he says, adding that the Brexit debate is only amplifying that.

“Older people blaming younger people, young people saying there's nowt to do.”

He says he can understand the frustration aimed at the town hall, but notes its budget has been slashed at the same time as poverty and social problems have snowballed around it.

"People say Tameside council is doing a sh*t job and I say: how would you cope if half your household income went and your roof then collapsed? Because that's what the council is facing.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

“Austerity it isn't even working.

“We are not using money productively to prevent problems, we are using it reactively to try and solve them.”

Community projects such as his are positive, he says, in that people have stepped into the breach.

“There's success stories,” he adds.

“But is it a success story to put sticking plasters on?

"I was around in the 80s as a young man and it seems to me a lot worse this time.

“There was a sense of camaraderie and solidarity and campaigning and now it really seems dog eat dog. Hope has been replaced with hopelessness.”

Down the road, Nigel Morgan has been helping run Ashton’s Citizens Advice Bureau since 1992.

Like Jane in Newton Heath, he and his volunteers - 25 of them - have been struggling to keep pace.

Tameside council has been very good with the CAB, he says, but ultimately cut its core grant in half last year, from £155,000 to £78,000, leaving them fighting for ‘crumbs’ from other external pots.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

“The debt inquiries are shooting up, the welfare inquiries are shooting up. Form-filling has become so complex it’s unbelievable,” he says, adding that the centre has become like a ‘nanny service’ for people unable to get their heads round the benefits system.

Like Jane’s, the centre has had to evolve to match the poverty closing in around it.

“Everybody seems to be suffering one way or another,” he says, before pointing to something that comes up again and again.

“Universal Credit is horrible. It pushes people further into depression and debt.”

(Universal Credit is ‘a killer’, agrees Jane Chadfield.)

The day I speak to Nigel, around 30 people have arrived for advice, the waiting room ‘jammed solid’.

“We run a food bank on a Friday for when people can’t access anything else - and the demand for that has shot up too.

“It was only meant to be a little one and now we have got people queueing.”

Demand for his service has risen 30pc in two years, at the same time as council support has halved.

“They’ve slipped it in,” he adds of the government’s approach to council austerity.

“We have got a lot more requests regarding social services, because social services has been cut.

“We get a lot of homelessness cases because of arrears, family breakups, debt. The homelessness situation is very, very bad at the moment. Very bad.”

(Image: Joel Goodman)

Like rising crime, homelessness is a crisis now so obvious, so painfully palpable to the public, that pressure is bearing down on government to solve it.

Yet the holes in the local government fabric through which people are falling into destitution just get wider.

In Manchester, the town hall is this week setting its tenth cuts budget.

But whereas back in 2010, the council was looking at closing Miles Platting baths, now it says it can no longer even afford to pay for statutory social care: it is relying on reserves that are running out.

Budget updates are a constant tale of robbing from one bit of the budget to plug another, a collective municipal sigh.

“Use of these reserves will be over a three-year period, a position that is not sustainable in the long-term,” says one of the latest financial reports by a city that - despite the lauded foreign investment in its city centre - still contains two of the 20 poorest wards in the country and has seen an 18-fold rise in rough sleeping since 2010.

Housing and homelessness workers speak of the mad scramble to find space for people legally owed a homeless duty, many of whom we last year revealed were ending up in scummy hotels with small children as a result.

One tells of struggling to keep a man with dangerously serious mental health problems under his recently-found roof, three support workers trying to keep him off drugs and alcohol, before discovering a six-week wait for addiction services.

“He doesn’t need it in six weeks,” they sigh, despairingly. “He needs it now.”

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

And yet. It still isn’t over.

The government’s latest plans spell more trouble for councils and communities here.

From 2020, it no longer intends to take deprivation into account when considering how to administer cash.

For context, Coldhurst in Oldham - where the council has already had to cut £208m since 2010 - has the highest level of child poverty out of all the country’s 9,000-plus council wards, according to Child Poverty Action. Moss Side in Manchester ranks at number eight; Rusholme at 13.

So after a decade of cuts, town hall austerity here appears far from ‘over’ . The burning injustices far from extinguished.

Back in Newton Heath, Jane Chadfield will simply carry on running services out of the Stirling centre with her husband, a former bus driver.

They will keep going with Carl’s ‘sticking plasters’.

“People in this area are isolated. They’ve got nowhere else to go,” muses Jane.

“It seems that because of all the cuts, the communities get to pick up the shortfall all the time.

“I’m registered disabled, but you carry on. Because you know people are worse off than us.”

What the government says

A government spokesman highlighted that councils such as Manchester and Salford still have money in reserves that they could use for budget-setting, also pointing to cash provided to Greater Manchester in the last year for a 'Housing First' strategy targeting rough sleepers and for 29 youth initiatives nationwide.

Its latest local government finance settlement 'supports and rewards economic growth and sets out reforms for a sustainable path for the future funding model for local government', the government said.

A spokesperson said: “We are investing in Britain’s future and over the next two years Greater Manchester will have access to £876m to meet the needs of its residents.

“Household incomes have never been higher and there are now one million fewer people living in absolute poverty since 2010, including 300,000 children.

“At Budget we announced more than £1 billion in extra funding for local government to help address pressures on council services.”

What Manchester council says

Council leader Sir Richard Leese said: "Nine years of austerity have created a Britain where food banks, insecure work and insecure housing have become normal.

"Benefit cuts have reversed the previous decade's reduction in family poverty and Manchester now sees a real increase in in-work poverty.

"It is areas like Manchester, with long-standing and deep-seated deprivation, that have felt the full force of government cuts, as the Tories siphon off money from us to send to the affluent southern shires. The longer the cuts go on, the more visible they become.

"With grossly unfair cuts - and as a result 40pc less staff than it had in 2010 - Manchester council does the best it can to mitigate the worst impact of the cuts, to find money for increasing demand in adults and children's social care as well as homelessness, and to keep the city's economy growing.

"But, as this year's council budget shows, we are rapidly reaching a point where this has become an impossible task."

What Tameside council says

Council leader Brenda Warrington said: "Tameside council has had to deal with sustained cuts year on year for almost a decade.

"These cuts in funding from central government mean we’ve had to find solutions to close a gap of over £120 million since 2010.

"We have worked hard to make savings by continuously innovating, all the while dealing with soaring demand in services for the most vulnerable, including children's social care.

"We believe the current situation is unfair, unbalanced and unsustainable; and that the communities we serve deserve better.

"We have worked hard to protect organisations like Citizen’s Advice, which do fantastic work protecting the most vulnerable, while maintaining other council services that our population expect and rely on, in the face of the government's unprecedented cuts.

"This almost impossible task has been made all the more difficult by the fact that central government has deliberately targeted those areas of greatest need which have suffered the harshest cuts.

"This must end, and I call for fair investment in the services our communities deserve, and the most vulnerable people in our society desperately need."