Derek Fraser will be well known to many of this journal’s readers for his work on the Poor Law, urban history, and successive editions of The Evolution of the British Welfare State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973-2017). His latest book provides a detailed account of the Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services (London: HMSO, 1942) and its status as a ‘blueprint’ for the creation of the postwar welfare state and ‘the most important official social publication of the twentieth century’ (p. 1).
The book includes an introduction and conclusion and nine numbered chapters. The introduction provides a brief overview of some of the most important academic commentaries that the Report has elicited over the last eighty years, with specific references to the work of Correlli Barnett, Anne Digby, Rodney Lowe, Brian Abel-Smith, Peter Baldwin, and David Edgerton.Footnote 1 Chapter 1 summarises different aspects of the history of British social policy from the passage of the second Elizabethan Poor Law Act in 1601 to the end of the 1930s, and Chapter 2 describes some of the main changes that were implemented during the early stages of the Second World War before the Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services was constituted. As is well known, the Committee was originally expected to focus on ‘administrative and technical shortcomings’ (p. 36), and Beveridge viewed his own appointment more as a demotion than an opportunity.
The next four chapters are based on the author’s meticulous reading of both the Report and the evidence on which it was based, alongside a large number of official papers and the famous House of Commons debate in February 1943. Chapter 3 describes the Committee’s work in considerable detail, including accounts of background papers, delegations, and meetings. Chapter 4 reviews the evidence presented by a range of groups, including employers, trade unions, other existing providers, political parties and pressure groups, professional bodies, local authorities, and users’ organisations; and Chapter 5 discusses the Report itself. Chapter 6 examines the responses elicited from the press and public, political parties and organisations, the Government, and the House of Commons. As the author explains, the Commons’ debate played a pivotal role in establishing a clear sense in the public mind that Conservative support for Beveridge was much more lukewarm than Labour’s.
The following chapters then focus on the road from Beveridge to the creation of what Anne Digby called the ‘classic welfare state’. Although the Report has often been described as a ‘blueprint’, it left many further details to be worked out, and Chapter 7 describes this process in considerable detail. Chapter 8 is largely concerned with the efforts of different pressure groups, such as the Social Security League and the ‘quaintly-named Society of Individualists’ (p. 162), either to promote the Report or campaign against it, before proceeding to give a brief account of Beveridge’s ‘second great report’ (p. 164) on Full employment in a free society. Chapter 9 describes the raft of new policies introduced between the passage of the Butler Education Act in 1944 and Labour’s departure from office in 1951.
As Fraser explains, the book’s immediate purpose is to provide a detailed account of the ‘making’ of the Beveridge Report and its critical role in the formation of the postwar welfare state; however, there is a wider purpose to this. Fraser argues that, since 1945, a lot of academic effort has been devoted either to disparaging the Report or to ‘belittling’ it (pp. 4-5) and, given this, he argues that it is necessary to restore its reputation as one of the foundational documents of the postwar world.
Although the author is surely correct in his attempts to emphasise the Report’s importance, some readers might feel that he could have engaged more directly with some of its critics. Fraser argues that the Report was, in essence, surfing a progressive wave during the 1940s and that the majority of its contemporary critics were therefore situated on the right of the political spectrum. However, even in 1943, there were those who felt that the Report did not go far enough, especially in relation to the needs of both unmarried women and widows, and old-age pensioners (see e.g. House of Commons Debates, 17 February 1943, cols. 1784, 1909-10; 18 February 1943, cols. 2021-3). It is also arguable that Fraser could have done more to place the Report in the wider context of Beveridge’s own thinking. Although the book includes a brief discussion of Full employment in a free society, there is only a very fleeting reference to his third study of Voluntary action. Beveridge himself regarded this volume as ‘an appropriate sequel and completion’ of his original Report, and it also reflected some of his own reservations about the ways in which that report had been implemented.
The question of whether the Beveridge Report should be regarded as a ‘blueprint’ for the welfare state continues to attract attention. Although it contained a detailed outline of a ‘Plan for Social Security’, it said very little about the ways in which the other ‘five giants’ might be addressed. It only devoted four paragraphs to the maintenance of employment and fourteen paragraphs to the establishment of a ‘comprehensive health and rehabilitation service’, and it contained no specific proposals for the reform of either education or housing. However, Fraser is surely right to argue that it succeeded in capturing the popular imagination and galvanising support for a wider programme of reform. As James Griffiths argued in 1943, ‘the Beveridge plan has become … a symbol of the kind of Britain we are determined to build … a Britain in which the mass of the people shall be ensured security from preventable want’ (House of Commons Debates, 18 February 1943, col. 1965).
As Fraser argues, regardless of academic scruples, the Beveridge Report has continued to occupy an almost totemic status in subsequent policy discussions. There have been several calls for the publication of a ‘new Beveridge’ since at least the 1980s, and these intensified during the Covid pandemic. However, even though many commentators have sought to draw parallels between the Second World War and Covid, there is little evidence that such a moment has yet arrived.
