Giants: A New Beveridge Report

Poverty in modern-day Britain looks different to the form it took in Beveridge's day but it has not disappeared. For 14 million people across the UK the lack of access to the goods and services necessary to live a decent life and to participate fully in society remains a grim reality. Despite rising standards of living, social and economic structures continue to trap those at the bottom in constant job insecurity, ill-health, overcrowded housing and educational disadvantage. Helen Barnard considers what it might take to finally slay the giant of poverty in Britain. She examines how we might build a fairer, more equal society, and what a modern welfare state should aim to achieve, including an honest appraisal of the trade-offs and choices involved in creating it.

In 1942 life expectancy at birth was 66 for women and 60 for men. Death was usually due to degenerative and infectious diseases. The greatest postwar success in the fight against disease was the establishment of the NHS and care that was free at the point of delivery. Life expectancy rose dramatically, but since 2011 incremental improvements have stalled and even, in some regions, begun to reverse. Infant mortality rates have crept up and the postcode lottery of health provision underscores the level of social inequality in the UK. Good health is not simply the absence of disease. It is the collective of physical, social and mental well-being. It is the product of nutrition and genetics, of healthy lifestyles and preventative health interventions. It is the interaction between the conditions in which we live, work, play and age. Yet access to many of the things that make and keep us healthy are not evenly distributed in the population. Achieving good health is then deeply entwined with all aspects of society and cannot simply be solved by policies in one area alone. In our rediscovery of Beveridge, the shadow of the pandemic looms large. It is has never been more urgent to address the underlying causes of Disease. And it has never been clearer that these determinants are not only social or physiological, but also political.

British society is increasingly divided into the haves and the have-nots. Housing epitomizes this division with spiralling rents, exorbitant prices, lack of council provision, poorly maintained stock, and polluted cities with ever decreasing green space. Daniel Renwick and Robbie Shilliam provide a recent history of squalor culminating in the Grenfell Tower fire. In doing so they reveal a profound political failure to provide fair and just solutions to shelter—the most basic of human needs. Renwick and Shilliam argue that agents of change exist within those populations presently damned by a racist and class-riven system of housing provision.

UK workers are stuck in a low-pay, low-productivity rut, with far too many people working in poor quality, insecure jobs, with little training or chance of getting on. Katy Jones and Ashwin Kumar question the mantra that "work is the best way out of poverty" and examine the in-work poverty that now defines employment for many. The state's engagement with people out of work is shown to ignore the needs of lone parents and disabled people, and has little concern for skills and career progression. When coupled with the degradation of social infrastructure, such as child care and transport, the barriers to quality work can become insurmountable. Jones and Kumar's insightful analysis reveals the need to move away from positioning unemployment as a "behavioural problem" to be corrected by coercive labour market policies to one that considers the wider obstacles to better paid, quality jobs.

As a universal experience school provokes strongly-held opinions. The views of teachers, parents, pupils compete with those of educational theorists, social engineers and ideologues. Although undoubtedly much improved since the time of Beveridge, the provision of education remains beset with challenges. Sally Tomlinson's engaging, and at times personal, journey through Britain's postwar experience of schooling and education reform draws on her many years of working in the sector. She explains how legacies of different systems and countless policy initiatives have led to the persistence of social inequalities, entrenching them in society and perpetuated by the power dynamics that they create between class, race and gender. Furthermore, she shows how the increasing mania for testing, targets, choice and competition, which has made schools into a marketplace and young people into consumers, threatens to undermine schools as a place where citizens can share learning and the democratic values that are needed as much today as they were in Beveridge's time.