In 2010, the so-called age of austerity was launched by the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition, amid a wave of striver v skiver rhetoric.
In November 2016, a United Nations inquiry had found that UK welfare reforms had led to “grave and systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights, highlighting concerns around the new personal independence payment (PIP), increase in benefit sanctions, and evidence of “significant hardship, including financial, material and psychological” experienced by disabled people undergoing benefit assessments.
Last year, in April 2024, prior to the general election, UN disability rights experts concluded that the UK government had made “no significant progress” in the more than seven years since its 2016 inquiry, noting that they were “appalled” by reports of deaths linked to benefit claims, which they say have a “disturbingly consistent theme”.
This “disturbingly consistent theme” is the subject of Museum of Austerity, a mixed reality exhibition showing at the Young Vic Theatre, from 5 December 2025. Made in collaboration with John Pring, editor of Disability News Service, Museum of Austerity juxtaposes striking holographic imagery alongside testimony of bereaved families who lost loved ones amid deeply difficult encounters with the benefit system.
Each family’s story told in the Museum is particular and personal: there are stories of brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers from across the country, yet all share the same underlying theme. In each case, the person who died, and the family they left behind, felt grievously let down by the state, when the safety net they expected to catch them was not there.
The stories are hard to listen to. None of us involved in Museum of Austerity can pretend it’s been comfortable to make or that it’s an easy journey for audiences. But as our current government wrestles with itself about further changes to the social security system, the stories in the Museum of Austerity serve as a stark reminder of the human cost of pushing through cost-cutting legislation without proper consultation or impact assessment.
Decisions made in Westminster have consequences that play out slowly in people’s homes over many years. The relationship between a politician’s vote, the decision of a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) assessor and the quiet, invisible death many miles away, some years later can be hard to see clearly. But coroners in multiple individual cases have found that serious failures in disability benefit administration have materially contributed to, precipitated, or were the predominant factor in such deaths.