Beveridge’s 1942 Report was first and foremost a plan for the abolition of want. Yet want, in the form of poverty, has proved far from easy to abolish. This paper attempts to understand why, 70 years after the Beveridge Report, poverty continues to be so prevalent and will attempt to suggest what a renewed attack on want might look like.
Looking both at the history of UK policy and internationally it’s clear that countries that set out to reduce poverty, and are prepared to increase spending in order to do so, find that poverty does indeed reduce. This paper argues that a strategy to tackle poverty cannot focus solely on redistribution. The need to commit additional resources to tackling poverty, and the ability to do so, depend to a large extent on levels of employment across a population.
This report suggests that current research on poverty points in one direction – universal and employment based solutions.