I thought it was my covid-addled brain that was causing me to struggle to follow this thread, but I've finally realised it's not, it's just that the vast majority of replies are ignoring the paper and arguing against a straw man.
The paper isn't claiming that austerity has increased poverty (though I wouldn't be at all surprised if it has), it's claiming that austerity has had a negative impact on mortality rates. In fact, the paper only mentions "poverty" twice - once in the 'Strengths and Weaknesses' section and once in the 'Relevance to Other Studies' section. The only time it appears in my post is as a quote and not even, imo, the most salient part. Yet as so often happens here the discussion devolves into a nitpicking of terms* and ignores the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that austerity kills, and the government needs to end its harmful policies.
The paper is building on previous research that has found that austerity has caused excess deaths.
BoaF helpfully quoted the second paragraph of the Introduction that summarised this research. There are plenty of references there if anyone wants to get sucked down a very depressing rabbit hole.
The authors clearly state the aims of their research,
we sought to statistically test whether there are differences when all-cause mortality trends changed, and to quantify the number of sex-specific deaths that have been observed in the past decade compared with what was expected given previous trends.
They wanted to look at sex-specific deaths because women have been disproportionately affected by austerity measures and they wanted to see if that had led to them bearing the brunt of the excess mortality too. As they explain in paragraph 3 of the Introduction,
There is also evidence that the reductions in social security income and loss of services have disproportionately affected women in the UK. This is for a number of important reasons including: more women being in receipt of social security payments in the first place; the disproportionate effects of cuts on particular, female-dominated, groups such as lone parents; the contraction in public sector jobs where women are likely to be employed; and inequalities in caring responsibilities (and the associated need for local government services and social care in particular).23–29 Among the elderly, the fact that more women live alone and are unable to share financial burdens may also be relevant.30 However, it is unclear whether the mortality impact of austerity has also been worse for women. Some recent descriptive trends supported this hypothesis, with adverse changes in all- cause mortality seemingly occurring earlier for women (around 2010–2011) than men (around 2012) in some UK countries and cities.4 In contrast, previous analyses of Scottish trends suggested similar turning points for both sexes.3 Given that uncertainty, the overall aim of this study was to examine whether there are differences in trends between men and women in Great Britain which might support the hypothesis of a greater health impact of austerity on women.
Surprisingly, the analysis found that the majority of excess deaths were in men, not women, though,
...among those living in the most deprived 20% of areas in Scotland and England, mortality rates between 2010 and 2019 increased to a greater degree among women compared with men. [first paragraph of the Discussion]
Honestly, I thought that would end up being the focus of the nitpicking - why are men dying more if austerity is harming women more? It's an interesting question and one the authors don't yet have a good answer for. But no, lets debate whether poverty is really harmful
The thing with austerity is that it has the potential to harm anyone outside the richest, because it cuts services we all rely on. For example,
the BMJ [PDF] published research earlier this year that showed that delays in patient admissions to A&E increased chances of mortality. They found that the risk of death in the month following A&E attendance was 16 per cent higher for those who waited over 12 hours than those seen within four. The paper doesn't examine why delays occur, focusing instead on the potential mechanisms for the delays to increase mortality, but one explanation is likely the increase in
'Bed blocking'. Austerity cuts to social services made it harder to find people the community-based care they needed to permit their discharge, which leads to delays in people being admitted, which leads to their increased chance of death. If a UK-based forumite gets hit by a car tomorrow and are sufficiently injured to need to go to hospital by ambulance, their chance of survival is impacted by the austerity measures implemented by this government.
* To be generous to those nitpickers, I will acknowledge the paper refers to 'deprived' populations, but deprivation is different to poverty. The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government uses the
following definition,
Though ‘poverty’ and ‘deprivation’ have often been used interchangeably, many have argued that a clear distinction should be made between them8. People are in poverty if they lack the financial resources to meet their needs, whereas people can be regarded as deprived due to a lack of resources of all kinds, not just income. ‘Deprivation’ thus refers to people’s unmet needs, whereas ‘poverty’ refers to the lack of resources required to meet those needs.
Put more clearly,
Poverty is not having enough money to get by on where as deprivation refers to a general lack of resources and opportunities.