This week’s budget looks set to be much like Keir Starmer’s government: a cause for genuine optimism – but also a trigger for plenty of anxiety and dread.

Hiked business taxes, it seems, will be used to help the NHS. Thanks to Rachel Reeves’s changes to fiscal rules, there will also be a spurt of borrowing to fund infrastructure projects, including the rebuilding of crumbling schools and hospitals. Social housing is to receive a modest boost. But there is a lot of talk about other budgets continuing to be squeezed, not least when it comes to the money that goes from Whitehall to local councils that are already in dire financial straits. And here, we alight on something that the chancellor would do well to remember: the fact that austerity often turns out to be very, very expensive.

There is no better example than an issue that is now constantly in the news: how the state provides for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or Send. The mess of misery and stress this encompasses is manifested in families being refused anything like the right provision, and rising numbers of kids who are not in school at all. But inevitably, the current Send crisis is also about cold financial numbers.

Last Thursday, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report on the condition of England’s special needs system. Over the past decade, it said, the so-called high-needs block – which pays for provision and extra support in schools and colleges – has risen by 58%, to £10.7bn a year. Despite this, the Send deficits run up by local authorities may soon reach well over £4bn. At the moment, those overspends have been removed from councils’ balance sheets. They are scheduled to go back on in 2026: the report says that when that happens – and read this slowly – 43% of local authorities in England will be at........

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