Beveridge Report

You know, and Churchill lost that election.

And guess what? Attlee came on board and implemented the Beveridge Report of 1942.

And that was why in 1948, the NHS came on board.

And we've seen how the NHS is like a prized jewel of the British people.

This is in keeping really with the design of the system originally.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 described the state pension as a safety net.

It ensures a base certain level of income for all, but it also forms a really important part of the incomes of retirees across the wealth spectrum.

The Pensions Policy Institute in a separate paper show how across the earning spectrum, the state pension is really an important foundational income for everyone to either depend on or build off.

Parsons anchors his whole argument on William Beveridge's famous nineteen forty-two report, which, you know, laid the foundation for the modern UK welfare state.

The Beveridge Report.

Yeah.

Yeah, a huge historical milestone.

And secondly, you said, well, you know, we already have health and education.

If you go back to the post-war period when we had the Beveridge Plan and the founding of the welfare state and they had council houses...

So we built houses that people lived in and were proud and happy to live in.

And then that was all sold away by the right to buy.

They are the people who commission the Liberal peer, uh, Lord Beveridge, to write, to, um, author his famous report.

The Beveridge Report famously saying that there are these, these great social evils, evils like poverty, illness, hu- you know, hunger that need to be, uh, overcome, like, with the force of the state.

Uh, you know, the, that is commissioned by these Labour politicians, but they quite cannily give the job not to one of their own Labour Party people, but to a Liberal peer to do it.

Beveridge himself is influenced by people like the great Liberal economist John Maynard Keynes, and he is also in the tradition which we can see the Liberal Party as occupying going back to the beginning of the 20th century, the tradition of what was called in the early 20th century the new liberalism or social liberalism, which inherits the kind of liberal attachment to the idea of personal freedom, but which accepts that in a modern capitalist society, personal freedom can only be meaningfully exercised by someone who's being supported by a framework of socio- socioeconomic rights and access to, uh, important, you know, publicly provided services.

Uh, how are things different? How things might be comparable? How could we make them more comparable? What lessons could we actually learn? Well, before, before going further into that, let's just clarify a couple of points.

Actually, it occurs to me while I'm speaking that I-- there's a couple of things I need to clarify slightly and correct.

I think I said that Beveridge report was distributed sort of '41, '42.

Obviously, no, it came out at the end of '42.

I have one question.

That was, the fact that Andy Burnham is trying to use the inspiration of the Beveridge Report that founded the NHS to f- well, he, he wants to invite civil servants now to conduct reports to enlighten him on how the care service, h- sorry, how social care for elderly has failed, and how they can make a better system for 2029.

Does that give you optimism at all?

Not really.