Seventy years ago, as the allies were driving Nazi forces back across Europe, Britain was preparing for eventual peace and reconstruction. The nation was gripped not only by dispatches from the front but also by the Beveridge report, the blueprint for what was to become known as the welfare state.

In proposing a system of cradle-to-grave social security, improved education and a national health service, the report lacked nothing in ambition. Its author, Sir William Beveridge, declared that “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not patching”. Overnight, he became a national hero.

As we claw our way out of the wreckage of a global economic crash that has had a warlike impact, triggering spending cuts unprecedented in modern times, there is a sense in which the UK faces another revolutionary moment. The battered remains of Beveridge’s welfare state need rebuilding and redesigning for the 21st century, for the digital era and for a society that expects a very different relationship with government.



Beveridge, however, was on to something in basing his report on the need to tackle five “giant evils”: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. His list has stood the test of time so well that when the IPPR thinktank published recently its Condition of Britain analysis, it revisited the five topics for an update. Verdict: work still in progress.

But such is the scale and nature of the challenge facing our public services and the voluntary and community sector, which remains as much a part of the response to social need as it was in Beveridge’s day, that there is a strong case for recasting and redefining his five giants for 2014.

As the new Society Professionals service is introduced, bringing together the Guardian’s networks for public services and voluntary sector professionals, we propose five “modern evils”. Some are close to Beveridge’s originals, others less so; but all reflect the concerns of practitioners, policy-makers and politicians in the run-up to next year’s general election.

Over coming weeks, we shall explore and debate our new five giants. Your comments and contributions will be welcome. But in revisiting the agenda of the welfare state, and discussing how modern evils might be identified, confronted and slain, we need to keep in mind two key factors that will shape, and to some extent constrain, the response of public services and the voluntary sector.

The first is that there is no foreseeable return to the levels of public spending of a decade ago. So draconian has been the regime of spending cuts enforced over the past four years, with the same again to come, that on some estimates the UK will by 2017 have the lowest share of public spending among leading capitalist economies, including the US.

And there is no realistic prospect of that fundamentally changing, irrespective of the outcome of the general election. Although respectable economic arguments are made for boosting public spending, and/or reapportioning it towards welfare, the mainstream political parties are wedded to fiscal conservatism and wary of being portrayed as spendthrift or negligent of other spending areas such as defence.

The second context factor is the changed relationship between the citizen and the state. In Beveridge’s day, people were hugely grateful for any public service – they queued in their thousands to register with a GP when the NHS opened for business in 1948 – and were unquestioning of what they were given or told.

Today, society is far more consumerist: educated, informed and enabled to choose and challenge. Individuals know their rights and stand ready to insist on them. They increasingly expect, too, to be involved in the planning and transaction of public services: “co-production” is the buzzword, but in plain English it means much more of a partnership between the person delivering a service and the person receiving it.

So taking account of that changed landscape, what are the modern evils that we must take on and defeat?

Inequality is arguably the most serious threat to the UK’s social stability. There still exists the kind of sheer want that alarmed Beveridge – after all, 900,000 people depended on food banks last year – but behind that lies a widening income gap between rich and poor and the inequalities it leads to in lifestyle, education, careers and culture.

According to the Equality Trust thinktank, the 100 wealthiest people in the UK today have as much money as the poorest 18 million. Inequality is estimated to cost the country more than £39bn a year.

Disease, said Beveridge, “often causes that want and brings many other troubles in its train”. That remains the case, but the focus in 2014 is less on episodic disease and more on the 15 million people in England alone who are living with long-term health conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and depression. Together, they are said to account for 70% of total NHS spending.

How to provide care and support for these largely older people has become the overriding preoccupation of health planners. More particularly, in view of the NHS’s parlous finances, the preoccupation is how to help them manage their own conditions.

With the official UK unemployment rate well below the EU average, and the employment rate almost at a historic high, idleness might not seem a major concern. But the figures disguise a serious problem of under-employment: 8.2 million people, more than one in four of all workers, are employed part-time; 2.7 million employment contracts are “zero-hours”, guaranteeing no actual pay; and 4.5 million people describe themselves as self-employed, with self-employment accounting for 60% of all jobs growth.

With a record 4.2 million people working from home, there is growing concern about social isolation and the loss of the “social glue” of the workplace. Loneliness is recognised as a key welfare issue, with almost 5 million people saying television is their main form of company.

When Beveridge chose ignorance as one of his five giants, something which “no democracy can afford among its citizens”, he was making the argument for investment in education. Today it is the case that no democracy can afford digital exclusion among its citizens. With public services increasingly accessed online, the 6.4 million UK adults who have never used the internet are at a serious and growing disadvantage.

Restricted access to the net is another problem, especially for many public services professionals who are prevented from drawing freely on online tools and resources during the working day. As part of its analysis of digital exclusion, Society Professionals is this week campaigning for employers to allow and encourage greater online access, with appropriate safeguards in place.

Squalor is the one of Beveridge’s five evils that is surely as relevant today as 70 years ago. Housing – its availability, cost and quality – is one of the key battlegrounds on which the general election will be fought. An estimated 185,000 people are affected by homelessness every year, a figure that has risen annually for the past three years, and untold numbers of people are living illegally in converted garden sheds, often paying rogue landlords for the privilege.

Never can we have been more in need of the Beveridge effect. By 1948, just three years after the end of wartime hostilities, the number of houses built in the UK rose to 227,000, not counting pre-fabs. Last year, with the population 70% larger, just 109,000 new houses were completed in England.

David Brindle is the Guardian’s public services editor.

What do you think of our 21st century evils? Have we got them right? Do they reflect your working life? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.







