The government is cutting funding from civil society organizations and raising social and healthcare client fees. Kokoomus MP Wille Rydman asked on social media whether anyone had noticed the previous cuts in their daily life. I noticed. I looked at the streets, the emergency rooms, and the addiction services – and saw what happens when the safety net is torn away before a crisis even has a chance to fully begin.
After the government announced the results of its spending review, Wille Rydman asked on social media: “Did you notice the previous cuts in your daily life? Probably not.”
It is an arrogant question. And a wrong one.
My answer is: yes. I noticed. The people I work with noticed. And the city streets noticed – while addiction services could no longer see what was coming in time, because their resources had already been cut away.
The alfa-PVP crisis did not emerge from nowhere
When the alfa-PVP problem became visible in Southern Finland last summer, it did not come as a surprise to everyone. Experts had been warning for years that the drug market was changing and that Finland’s addiction service system was not capable of responding quickly enough. The warnings were heard, but not heeded.
What did we see on the streets? People in psychosis in parks. Paramedics facing situations for which they had neither training nor tools. Emergency rooms filling with patients for whom there was no follow-up care. Police resources stretched as public disorder increased. All of this is partly a consequence of cuts – not of any single substance.
Before alfa-PVP spread so explosively, organizations would have been able to respond more quickly. Low-threshold services could have reached people before situations escalated into crises. Workers on the ground would have had the time and resources to identify a shifting landscape. Now they do not – because funding has been cut, and cut, and cut again.
Organizational waste or essential work?
In his column, Rydman describes the grant system as one where “there was money to distribute in abundance” and where incentives arose to establish associations that were “at least pretending to do something” in the social and health sector. It is a convenient story – it paints civil society organizations as symbols of inefficiency and wasted money, making the cuts appear as sensible housekeeping.
In reality, addiction and mental health organizations do work that the public sector cannot. They reach people who are unable or unwilling to seek help from authorities. They provide low-threshold meeting places, peer support, and outreach work. They fill the gaps that fall through the cracks of the public system. And above all: they can respond quickly to a changing situation – or at least they could, before their funding began to be systematically cut.
When the STEA cuts of previous years accumulate alongside the new savings from this spending review, we are not talking about trimming inefficient structures. We are talking about removing the safety net from the very people who have no other net to fall into.
Who falls through the cracks?
This is the question the government does not answer in the spending review. Increases in client fees and cuts to organizations do not land evenly. They land on people who already have the least room to absorb them. Deprivation is, as research shows, cumulative.
For someone seeking help for the first time, a closed low-threshold service may mean they never come back. A price tag on getting help can shut the door before they even try.
The consequences of earlier cuts are already visible in how many people fall outside the reach of help entirely, or only access support once their situation has become a full crisis. Treating a crisis is always more expensive than early support – in human and economic terms alike. A government claiming to make savings will end up paying the bill many times over. Young people are struggling. Intensive social and healthcare services are overloaded. And more and more people are getting help far too late.
What the spending review really tells us
It tells us about values. About whose life is counted when we talk about Finnish wellbeing. About who is expected to give way when the economy tightens.
Rydman writes that the government has “reined in the reckless distribution of organizational grants.” I write that the government has decided that the most vulnerable people can afford to give a little more. That organizations doing work where no one else can are to be squeezed further. That client fees can rise for those who are already struggling to get by.
And when the next crisis comes – and it will come, because the market keeps changing, because new substances keep arriving, because human desperation does not disappear through budget cuts – people will ask again why the service system failed to respond. The answer is already known.
So to answer the question posed by our Minister of Social Affairs and Health: “yes, Wille. The cuts are visible in daily life. Come to the window. The people are calling.”