“…These include budget rules, there being higher levels of spending in other areas at the beginning of the austerity period, meaning savings were more readily identifiable in these areas, and the imperative to maintain services delivered from buildings which can be repurposed towards income-generation. Moreover, previous research has argued that decisions about expenditure on "Culture and Heritage" are unlikely to involve those who work in these services (Lawley, 2003;Rex, 2020b), raising the possibility that being the least affected subcategory is an unintended consequence of decisions taken elsewhere and in relation to other services rather than evidence of the agency and intentionality of advocates for spending on certain forms of culture. As such, although our analysis tallies with existing findings that discretionary services have been the most common target of austerity cuts (Streeck, 2014;Gray and Barford, 2018), we found that this interpretation requires nuance when it comes to the "Culture and Heritage" subcategory as by some measures, services in the "Other" subcategory (libraries, open spaces, tourism) have experienced a much steeper decline when set against "Culture and Heritage".…”