I got a copy of the Beveridge Report for my 80th birthday. Every government minister should read it

Among the fine presents I was given for my 80th birthday were a great notebook of lightweight blue paper that fitted in my pocket, a book of the works of Constable from the retiring editor of this illustrious publication, a set of handkerchiefs with my initials sewn on from the first person I approached when I was given the go-ahead to start Big Issue, a large cup from my middle daughter with the words “The world’s greatest dad”, etc, etc. I was also given the 1942 Beveridge Report from the man who turned Big Issue Invest from idea into reality. 

You could say I was spoiled rotten with affection, wine, kisses and embraces, which for an 80-year-old was greatly appreciated. Fortunately no item of clothing was offered, although I did go to John Lewis and get two suits in the sale a few days before. I have always been lacklustrous in my clothing since the days I left behind the foothills of youth and young manhood and became a larger chap with a potato-ish shape to me; alas the fate of many of us who probably take in far more carbohydrates than they can burn up. 

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A just pre-birthday filmed podcast – a ‘vodcast’ I believe – showed me waxing lyrical about my life and times with the worst possible posture issues, making me determined to scale down, or start wearing a toga to hide my bodily imperfections.  

Just before Christmas I wrote about a film recently made and being edited at the moment called The Man with the Plan. It’s all about Sir William Beveridge and his report, published on 20 November 1942 but commissioned in June 1941. According to my copy, the minister without portfolio, The Right Honourable Arthur Greenwood MP, stood up in the House of Commons on 10 June and announced the formation of Beveridge’s committee.

Greenwood was chairman of this committee on reconstruction problems, a rather wasteful committee you might imagine as the UK was not exactly winning the war and had not yet got the US as its main ally. 

Read more:

• How we lost sight of the Beveridge Principles
• 80 years on from the Beveridge Report, this is Britain’s new safety net
• John Bird: Birthday reflections conjure hopeful feelings

The Soviet Union was still an ally of the Nazis for another 12 days, until Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of Russia. 

But right in the middle of the conflict, with little evidence of a successful conclusion, Sir William was commissioned to imagine a better world, and his Social Insurance and Allied Services report was the result, leading to around 600,000 people buying a copy from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. An incredible realisation that in the middle of a crisis, an emergency that goes on and on, you need to be thinking of a time beyond the emergency. 

The other day, the day before my birthday, I stood up in the chamber of the House of Lords and called for the government to establish targets to get children out of poverty – which they were reluctant to do. With four and a half million children in poverty, targets would be a way of measuring governmental achievement. To spur people on to take seriously the whole idea of getting rid of the pernicious problem of children inheriting the poverty of their parents. 

But the government chooses to be measured by different means. It does not want to be hampered by targets that can be massaged, which would create a situation where the low-hanging fruit, the easy-to-get-out-of-poverty, would be addressed, but the issue of deep poverty would not – deep poverty being the intractable, deeply ingrained poverty that leaves children in poverty who are not easily shifted. 

I have to admit I sympathise with the government in its task of reducing children in poverty. Its aim, by 2030, is to get 550,000 children out of poverty. It’s like pulling teeth. But it did cause me to ask “Great that you are intent on getting just over half a million children out of poverty. But what about the other four million?” As I had the last word in the debate I did not get a reply to this question. 

But God in heaven’s name, is this not a surefire sign that that delicate old document from 84 years ago that I received as a birthday present should be pored over and thought about and incorporated anew if necessary into a ‘New Beveridge Report’? 

The shifting of four million children out of poverty, unachievable without also including their parents, is an impossible task, as admitted by the minister last week in the debate on my amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill going through parliament at the moment. For they have set their sights on getting just over 10% of that disastrous figure out of poverty, leaving four million awaiting some bus of opportunity that has seemingly yet to be constructed. 

Sir William’s report is an indictment of what you might call the school of ‘only do the small, the arbitrary, the possible’, without considering ‘the big, the total commitment, the prioritisation of getting rid of poverty’ that Beveridge suggested was necessary. 

What a birthday present that would be to the world. A complete commitment to getting rid of poverty and not just tinkering around its inglorious edges. A new Beveridge, improved and modernised and fit for our times. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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