This morning I appeared on Broadcasting House, a BBC Radio 4 programme. I was discussing what had happened to state welfare since William Beveridge's famous report. A Labour MP, Kate Green, was there taking a more favourable view of how things have developed than I do. It was a good, civilised, if brief, discussion.

I was honoured when Kate told me after the programme that she had read The Welfare State We're In. Sometimes people ask me what influence the book has had and I am never sure. I know that a signicant number of Conservative MPs and ministers have looked at it. But this is the first time a Labour MP has told me that she has read it. I am delighted by this since influence lasts better if it reaches both sides of the political divide. Not, of course, that Kate Green is likely to have agreed with it all by any means.

Among other things, I said that if Beveridge brought forward his plan today he would be regarded as a right-wing fanatic. The modern welfare state is a travesty of what he proposed. If his system had been put in place and persisted, much of the damage done by the welfare state would not have taken place.

He wanted a system of flat rate contributions for flat rate benefits. Means-tested benefits were designed be a tiny part of the system. In fact the very opposite has developed. Means-tested benefits are vastly more significant than unemployment benefit.

He did not specify any particular favours for lone parents. He was, provisionally, against special payments for housing benefit. He never even dreamed of those who became too ill to work being given more money or different conditions from those who are unemployed. The modern welfare state has very little to do with Beveridge. It is a corruption brought about by vote-seeking politicians - notably during the governments of Macmillan, Wilson and Heath - who knew and cared little about what could go wrong in welfare.

Beveridge proposed that the insurance flat rate payments should be at 'subsistence' level and that the non-insurance, means-tested assistance should be "something less desirable than insurance benefits; otherwise the insured persons get nothing for their contributions" (section 369). So the insured benefits would be 'subsistence' and the means tested benefits would be significantly less than that.

More on this, of course, is in The Welfare State We're In (chapter 2).

But here is a quotation on pensions and retirement that is not quoted in the book:

"...the conditions governing pension should be such as to encourage every person who can go on working after reaching pensionable age, to go on working and to postpone retirement and the claiming of pension." (Section 245)

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Housing • Media, including BBC bias • Pensions • Reform • Welfare benefits

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