The Museum of Austerity exhibition brings home the human cost of benefit cuts – MPs need to see it

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.

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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.

In the case of the young disabled mother, Philippa Day, for example, whose story is told in the Museum of Austerity, a coroner identified  28 different problems with the PP system contributing to her death.

Politicians past and present promise the electorate that changes to the benefit system will bring positive benefits such as incentivising disabled people into work, but academic research tells a different story. A report published this month by professor Ben Barr and his co-authors at University of Liverpool’s Institute of Population Health, assessing the impact of the 2016 Welfare Reform and Work Act, found “no evidence that the policy improved the employment chances for people with a long-term condition or disability” and instead that it “led to an increase in poverty and mental health problems for people with long term conditions leaving employment”. The report explicitly warns current policy makers about the risk of “repeating history” without learning from what has gone before.

The fear of history repeating is the driving force behind our Museum. Each family involved has shared their painful story in the hope that by doing so they might help prevent another similar death in another home at another point in the future.

Since we originally made it in 2021, Museum of Austerity has toured to cities across England and Europe. In December, we bring the exhibition to the Young Vic theatre, just a mile from the Houses of Parliament, where the fate of the people whose stories we tell was set in motion. We hope that MPs, peers and those who support them in government will make the short journey from Westminster to SE1 and give half an hour of their time to contemplate the lives that might be saved if our social security system were robustly designed to catch people in need, rather than trying to catch them out.

Sacha Wares is director and co-editor of Museum of Austerity. Museum of Austerity: A Mixed Reality Exhibition is showing at the Young Vic theatre until 16 January.

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