A new Beveridge?

COVID-19 has laid bare more than just the many deep-seated problems of England’s social care system that have defied the attempts of every government since the 1990s to tackle. Many of these problems date back to the absence of social care from the welfare state settlement after the Second World War. COVID-19 has also heralded sweeping changes in how we lead our lives, how we work, shop and engage with friends, families and wider social networks. In many places, it has led to a surge in community spirit, in neighbourliness and volunteering. Necessity demanded that councils work in different, more productive ways with their partners in private, voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors. The rapidity of some of these shifts in working practices and decision-making, compared with the normally placid pace of policy-making, brings to mind Lenin’s dictum that ‘there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’

This renewed sense of social solidarity and the heightened exposure of the public to the realities about social care, as well as the inequalities in wider society revealed by the pandemic. have together prompted debate as to whether the current crisis offers the opportunity for a ‘new Beveridge’, a 21st-century version of that seminal report that was to lay the foundations of the post-war British welfare state. The impact of COVID-19 has boosted the argument that fundamental changes can no longer be postponed and that there is now an unmissable opportunity to grasp the nettle of reform. The phrase ‘Build Back Better’ has been widely used, here and in the USA, to convey a sense of the large-scale renewal and reconstruction that is needed as the country emerges from the pandemic. As development and globalisation expert Ian Goldin observes, the pandemic came on top of other escalating crises around the world. He points to those in climate change, geopolitics and social inequalities; changes that are creating immense strains in many societies. His clarion call is for radical changes, rather than a return to ‘business as usual’: