So far, I’ve been talking about the type and level of financial support that's on offer in our social security system. But when you talk to people living in poverty, it's clear that it is equally important to consider non-financial support and how people are treated when they access both financial and non-financial services. An abstract view of poverty tends to focus purely on amounts of money and modelling behavioural responses to taxes, benefits, the labour market and so on. But the experience of poverty is as much about feeling powerless, dismissed and despised as it is about material hardship.

Public services – social security, employment support and health, social and local authority services – can build people up or knock them down. They can be a forum within which people are treated with dignity, listened to and respected, and where they are empowered to change their circumstances and realize their ambitions. Or they can be a place where people are made to feel they are problems to be fixed and are further disempowered and infantilized.

Before Beveridge and the reforms of the 1940s onwards, our public services were made up of a patchwork of voluntary and mutual organizations, Church provision and some limited local government funding and services. The Elizabethan Poor Law, introduced at the end of the sixteenth century, provided a legal underpinning and baked in the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. It ensured that the evolving system included detailed assessments and harsh conditions to prevent those classified as undeserving from receiving help that might encourage idleness and immorality. There were basically three roles available within this system: wise benefactor, passive supplicant and roguish malefactor. There were some positives to this system, particularly its localized nature and close involvement of what we would now call grassroots voluntary and community sector organizations. However, it failed to protect many people from hardship or provide the help that would enable them to build a better life for themselves. It was also wholly unsuited to the new industrial age.

The development of the industrial economy transformed all parts of society. Workers were collected in large numbers in cities, working in factories and on production lines and living in close proximity to the elites and middle classes. The growth of city slums gave rise to fears of disease spreading not only through the new working classes but also to the middle classes.

Beveridge was clear that maintaining full employment was necessary to his plan. It was a good in itself but was also vital to make the welfare state affordable and ensure workers would only need their unemployment payments for short periods. All that is still true, but the problems we now face in our labour market have changed.

Mass unemployment, although not necessarily gone for ever, has ceased to be the big challenge facing us. After the Great Recession and before Covid-19, the employment rate recovered amazingly strongly, but more and more workers were still pulled into poverty. The big issues now are low pay, lack of progression, insecurity and underemployment. Our central concern should be the quality of work that those at the lower end of the labour market are able to get, not just how many people have a job. So how do we prevent workers getting stuck in low-quality jobs?

One answer is to improve their skills and qualifications so that individuals can compete more effectively for better work and move employer to increase their pay, security and treatment. That is certainly necessary. The majority of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds reach the age of 16 without the baseline of five good GCSEs or their equivalent. The gap in attainment between children from richer and poorer families has remained stubbornly large and the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out a decade's worth of (very modest) progress in narrowing it (Education Endowment Foundation 2021). Five million adults lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Accessing the next stages of education and getting a decent start in your working life is incredibly difficult without these basics.

Once adults are in the labour market, those with low levels of qualifications are far less likely to then get further training from employers than those who already have higher qualifications. The payback for doing training as an adult, in terms of getting better work or higher pay, is uncertain and very variable depending on the qualification, sector and where in the country you are. The barriers to low-paid workers getting more qualifications without the support of their employers are high; many people experience difficulties with finding the time to study when also working and caring, avoiding falling foul of benefit conditions or facing unacceptable hardship or debt if they try to reduce current work to allow training.

When I helped set up the Social Metrics Commission in 2016, my enthusiasm was born of weariness and frustration. Too many meetings spent debating how to measure poverty instead of how to reduce it. Too many interviews in which arguing over what poverty was crowded out discussion of how to free people from it. Baroness Philippa Stroud (chair of the commission and former adviser to the secretary of state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith) started the commission after seven bruising years in the white heat of government, having those same arguments but with much higher stakes.

Stroud and Duncan Smith had come into government with a grand plan: to sweep away seven old benefits and replace them with universal credit. They worked alongside the Conservative peer, David Freud, who had previously advised the Labour government and then joined the Conservative-led Coalition government in 2010. In his book, Clashing Agendas: Inside the Welfare Trap, Freud tells the gory story of his years in office. He details their battles with the Treasury through the Coalition years and then under the Conservative majority government from 2015.

The original plan for universal credit had widespread support among the policy and research community. It would have increased the generosity of the benefit system at the same time as making its structure simpler and more flexible. Sadly, this approach was dead on arrival at the Treasury. Chancellor George Osborne's grand plan for the UK's social security system was to suck billions of pounds out of it. He had no interest in Duncan Smith's vision until he realized it could be a Trojan horse to slash levels of support.

A backbench rebellion among Conservative MPs prevented Osborne and Prime Minister David Cameron from enormous tax credit cuts in 2015. MPs lost their nerve at the thought of constituency surgeries full of angry people who had seen their incomes slashed by thousands of pounds overnight.

When a nation endures a collective ordeal, it does not emerge unchanged. Trauma brings fear, loss and, if we’re lucky, renewal. The Britain which emerged from the Second World War was not the nation which had entered it. Beveridge saw the war as offering the chance of real change: “the purpose of victory is to live in a better world than the old world”. The war created the impetus to re-evaluate not just what was possible but what was just. Soldiers returning from the front should not be left to the poverty and powerlessness so many faced after the previous war. Women who had lost their husbands while they kept the home fires burning and the factories turning out munitions should not face penury or see their children starve.

In 2020, we entered another collective ordeal. The Covid-19 pandemic brought fear and loss in abundance. It led to restrictions to domestic life even greater, in some ways, than those during the war. The pandemic exposed the weakness of our systems, shamefully demonstrated by a coronavirus death rate twice as high in the most deprived areas as in the least deprived. But it also demonstrated our collective strength. Improvements to social security and housing security which had seemed out of reach for years were pushed through in days. Low-paid workers, dismissed as unskilled only weeks before the pandemic hit, were revealed as the backbone of Britain: supermarket staff, care assistants, delivery drivers and many others faced the risk of infection to keep the rest of us safe. As we emerge out of the Covid-19 crisis, we have the same opportunity as that grasped by Beveridge: to create a better world rather than reverting to the old one. This book is about the aspects of the pre-Covid-19 world we should leave behind and how I believe we can grow something better.

I’ve loved writing this book. It's been a joy and a privilege to have the chance to do so. I’m very grateful to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for the opportunity to be part of its work to understand and find solutions to poverty, for fantastic flexibility and support when I’ve been unwell and for generously enabling me to take the time to write this book.

Alison Howson and the team at Agenda Publishing have been wonderful to work with and guided me through the book-writing journey with expert grace.

The essence of what it means to be “in want” is remarkably stable across history and geography. When Beveridge named Want as one of the giants that the nation should slay, he did not mean that citizens should have everything they wanted. He meant that people should be able to meet their essential needs. He spoke ambitiously about abolishing poverty.

So, what are the essentials for a life in which we are not trapped “in want”? For most people, in most places, a decent life means: a secure home; steady work; being able to cover the bills and buy essentials; giving our children a good start in life; good mental and physical health and access to healthcare; respect and a sense of personal dignity; feeling part of society.

What these things look like and how you get them varies according to time and place. The role of the state and the responsibilities of employers, business, civil society, individuals and families are fiercely debated. Beveridge's vision was for the state to play a greater role than ever before: as an instrument by which we discharge our collective responsibilities to one another. The power of his vision was that we can take care of one another not only through family and community but also through collective institutions. When times are tough we do not need to depend on the unreliable kindness of strangers.

Hang on, isn't this supposed to be a “golden age” for old age? Aren't the young getting a raw deal while older generations enjoy the fruits of gold-plated pensions, a house price boom and generous state support? Yes, but not all pensioners are sitting pretty and enjoying a healthier and wealthier retirement than could have been imagined by previous generations, or than is likely to be on offer for their grandchildren. There are hundreds of thousands who are suffering and see no way out.

A 2013 report for the DWP (Kotecha 2013) included descriptions of the experiences of older people living on low incomes. Despite the dispassionate language, they show the dire situations some found themselves trapped in:

Research by the charity Independent Age (Seaman 2020) highlights how disempowered and trapped many older people feel, especially those on low incomes.

Poverty is fundamentally about power and powerlessness. The workers with the least power can't avoid jobs that trap them in poverty. The least valuable consumers can't get the best prices. Those without economic and social power are held back, ground down and exposed to public services that treat them at best as children or at worst as cogs in the machine. They don't have the economic power to avoid the social security system or buy better mental health treatment. They don't have the social power to assert their rights or persuade providers to behave with compassion. They don't have the political power to challenge stereotypes or change the direction of policy.

Prejudice and discrimination strip away another layer of power, leaving disabled people, some Black and minority ethnic groups and women with even fewer options and less leverage to change their situation.

When Beveridge proposed the industrial welfare state he did so in an age when the industrial working classes were claiming more power through organized labour. But he and his ilk were still the products of the age of deference and the structures and systems he designed reflect that. His five giants still stalk the UK, but to defeat their modern incarnations we need a new rebalancing of power for a new technological age.

We have to rebalance digital markets to empower consumers; rebalance labour markets so they offer better jobs and careers paths for workers; rebalance the housing market to create stable homes; rebalance our tax system to tap into wealth and revive fairness; and rebalance our public services to put users in the driving seat and relationships at their heart.

We can't defeat the giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness by shuffling a bit of money around or tweaking a few policies. We need to rethink what kind of society we want to live in, using the post-pandemic moment to remake those parts of our economy and our state that are no longer fit for purpose. This time around it won't be good enough for us to hand down solutions from on high and expect the grateful masses to queue up to buy them as they did in 1942. Nor can the changes that we need to make be done by stealth. They need to emerge from public deliberation and have the backing of democratic consent.

It's strange how little we talk about the fact that half of the 14 million people in poverty in the UK are disabled or live with someone who is. Nearly four in ten working-age disabled people live in poverty, more than twice as high as the rate for non-disabled adults. Comparing the UK with other European countries shows that we are failing our disabled fellow citizens to a greater extent than most other countries (according to official Eurostat disability statistics). We have a higher proportion of disabled people at risk of poverty and social exclusion than all the other northern European countries aside from Germany, which equals us. The gap between poverty rates for disabled and non-disabled people is also particularly high in the UK.

Disabled people tend to have lower incomes than non-disabled people, with higher costs, pulling them into hardship. Carers are also much more likely to be trapped in poverty than those who aren't caring for other adults, in large part because they need to balance paid work and unpaid caring, which restricts the hours and jobs they can do. Young carers are also disadvantaged where their school education or chance to gain more qualifications as an adult have been constrained by their caring role. Of the nearly 4.5 million informal adult carers in the UK, almost a quarter are living in poverty. Three factors drive this: limited access to good jobs, higher costs and inadequate social security.

ACCESS TO GOOD JOBS

Work is how most people escape poverty, but disabled people are far less likely to be employed than non-disabled people and they’re paid less when they are in work. Just over half of disabled people were employed in 2019, compared to 82 per cent of non-disabled people. That gap has closed slightly in recent years but incredibly slowly. Work generally needs to be full time to be a reliable route out of poverty, but disabled people are more likely than non-disabled people to work part time: 32 per cent compared to only 20 per cent.

A piece of advice: if you’re going to live through a deep recession, do your very best not to be a young adult. If you must be young, don't be Black (or Pakistani or Bangladeshi). If you insist on being both young and Black, try your very hardest to have welloff parents.

I remember being told years ago that children and young adults are much less likely to be seriously hurt by a fall than older ones. They’re more flexible and more resilient than older adults whose bones are more brittle and muscles less elastic. The younger you are the more quickly and easily you bounce back. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true of young adults and recessions.

In 2011, a young man called Marc took part in the Poverty and Social Exclusion research project in the UK (Poverty and Social Exclusion 2013). He was 19, lived in Redcar in North Yorkshire and had been looking for work for two years. He’d applied for hundreds of jobs and been on umpteen employability schemes but had no luck. In his area there were 5,490 people on jobseeker’s allowance and looking for work but only 460 vacancies. He lived with his sister in charity-supported housing but only had four months left on his tenancy there. Marc talked about his hopes for the future and his struggles both materially and with his mental health: I’ll probably want in my life just to be stable enough to feed myself and my kids, cos my Mum couldn't when … she couldn't afford to feed herself when she was feeding us …

Some days she couldn't afford to feed us and herself so she would feed us and she would starve herself for two days. Just things like that. That would really affect someone. I wouldn't want to bring up someone like that. I would struggle. I don't know how she went through it at all …

I’ve been searching for work for two and a half years, near enough three, and it's coming up clueless at the moment. Must have been hundreds, hundreds of jobs I’ve applied for in the past two/three years. Bar tending jobs, cleaning jobs. Everything you can probably think of, even fixing lampposts …

The combination of well-regulated market capitalism and active government redistribution have led to enormous rises in living standards and reductions in poverty over the last two centuries (Ortiz-Ospina 2017). Changes to how production was organized and the rise of industrialization led to an explosion of expertise, innovation and productivity (as well as the continued exploitation of people in many parts of the world which had been colonized or forced to feed the economic success of dominant powers). People in countries that embraced market capitalism are able to enjoy living standards, comforts and leisure unimagined by their predecessors and still far out of reach of vast swathes of the world's population. These gains were not simply the result of untrammelled markets however. They also rested on the growth of governmental ambition and reach. GDP has grown massively in the last century but, equally importantly, government spending as a share of national income has also shot up since the 1930s: from under 10 per cent in the UK at the start of the twentieth century to over 30 per cent by the end of the century (Brien & Keep 2018).

Ironically, given that their proponents tend to be locked in conflict, it seems to have been the combination of globalization and public spending, especially on social safety nets, that have delivered better living standards and lower poverty. We have talked a lot so far about the safety net side of this equation, but what about the markets side?

At the heart of market capitalism is the idea of the active consumer. The market organizes itself to meet the evolving needs of its consumers, competing for their custom and innovating to get an edge over the competition either by reducing prices or improving the goods or service being bought. Since poverty is about someone's resources not meeting their needs, reducing costs can free people from poverty if it means their resources can go further. When food prices are low, more people can feed themselves. If the cost of heating falls, more people can afford to keep their homes warm. Over a decade of research on living standards and the cost of meeting our basic needs, Loughborough University's minimum income standards programme has offered striking examples of the power of this to improve people's lives (Hirsch et al. 2018).

Finally, it's time to talk about the twin elephants in the room. First, taxes: how we raise the money to pay for the public services we all rely on and which are crucial to slaying the poverty giant. Second, housing: housing costs are a central driver of poverty, locking people into poverty even as wages rise. Too many people in poverty are trapped in overcrowded, damp, unsafe homes. High costs and insecurity pull increasing numbers into homelessness. These two issues are linked. The structure of our tax system helps to shape both the housing and labour markets. How we raise money is as important as how much we raise and how we choose to spend it. Increasing the supply of housing is vital but not sufficient. We also need to change the structure of the housing market and the ways in which housing operates as an asset as well as a home.

In 2018, David Willetts (a Conservative MP and minister in the 1990s and again in the Coalition government from 2010 to 2014, now in the House of Lords, colloquially known as “Two Brains”) gave a speech in which he delivered some home truths to his fellow boomers (Willetts 2018):

It doesn't require two brains to know that he was right, or that actually achieving this shift is a political nightmare. But the argument that regularly breaks out about wealth taxes and inheritance needs to be understood in the broader context of how both our tax system and the shape of our national wealth have changed over the last few decades, and the pressures which make it imperative that we grasp the nettle of redesigning our approach to both.

We have already seen that disabled people are much more likely to live in poverty compared to non-disabled people, that this is closely linked to the prejudice that still exists against them and that their social security support has been eroded in recent years. Two other dimensions of equality that are intimately connected to poverty are ethnicity and gender.

RACIAL INJUSTICE: THE INVISIBLE POVERTY TRAP

In 2020, the persistence and consequences of racial injustice were put into stark relief by the combination of the shockingly unequal impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and increased activism and awareness sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. People from Black and South Asian groups suffered disproportionately high death rates from Covid-19, as did people from deprived backgrounds. This shouldn't have been a surprise. Health inequalities are longstanding and stubborn: people from poorer backgrounds have higher rates of illness and shorter, less healthy lives than those who are better off. The accumulated stresses of poverty, the impacts of unhealthy housing and poor-quality work, and less access to health and other services all combine to produce this pattern. The Covid-19 pandemic followed the same path, disproportionately hitting people who already had poor health, lived in overcrowded homes and did jobs that meant they were at higher risk. That led to disproportionately high deaths among people from some Black and minority ethnic groups because of the higher proportions living in poverty, in bad housing and in low-paid, insecure jobs which couldn't be done from home.

If you live in a Black or minority ethnic family, your chances of living in poverty are much higher than if you live in a white family. A fifth of people in white families live in poverty, compared to more than a third of those in Black and minority ethnic families. The patterns vary across different ethnic groups of course: more than half of people in the Bangladeshi group live in poverty, nearly half of Pakistani people and four in ten Black people. By contrast, a quarter of those of Indian heritage do: still higher than the fifth of white people but a much smaller gap.

The most important reason for the higher poverty rates is inequality in our labour market.

The Beveridge report was famously popular, with people queuing up to buy it. Beveridge was certainly concerned to reflect in his proposals his views about what the British public believed was fair and would put up with. But his blueprint and the prior reports it built on were developed in a period still dominated by hierarchy and patronage. The leading thinkers behind them were from privileged backgrounds with a strong flavour of what we now call the “white saviour complex” in relation to international development: solutions developed and delivered by well-intentioned outsiders with little or no input from those they intend to help and certainly no ceding of power to people with direct experience of the issues under consideration. Since the initial setting up of the welfare state, it has been built on and adapted over time to meet changing political imperatives but rarely with much involvement of those with direct experience of the system or other parts of the public. Even very big changes – such as the introduction of universal credit – have been pursued with extraordinarily little involvement from either the wider public or those with direct experience of the system.

This lack of public engagement has become more problematic as the cost of the system has increased and the problems it needs to address have evolved. There has been a constant pressure to reduce the cost of many parts of the system, with little or no substantive discussion of what we, as a society, really value and want to maintain, let alone how we collectively want the system to evolve to meet modern challenges. Attacking and defending specific benefit levels or conditions have consumed the debate, leading to constant changes back and forth as political pressures shift.

If we want to create a better social security system, it has to be based on sustainable public consent. That doesn't mean taking the latest poll and enacting it on the backs of people who are already facing hardship. But it does mean engaging the public in thoughtful deliberation and focusing on the underlying commitments that we want to make to each other. We should appeal to our best sides in this: to our empathetic, hopeful, compassionate selves. We should not allow prejudice and stereotypes to dictate policy. But the proponents of new ideas and radical solutions can't simply ignore the public's views.

Can you really die of shame? Can stigma be lethal? It is easy to think about poverty purely in relation to how much money people have and their material standard of living. But emotional suffering and shame are central to the experience of poverty. Even in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith commented that a linen shirt and leather shoes had been “rendered … necessary” by “custom”; “the want of which would be supposed to denote [a] disgraceful degree of poverty” (Smith 1776). A 2012 study published by the charity Turn2Us divided the shame and stigma experienced by people in relation to benefits into three categories (Baumberg et al. 2012):

• 1. Personal stigma – the feeling of shame at having “failed”, not being able to have and do the things that others can, being reliant on benefits or charity.

• 2. Social stigma – being judged by others as a failure, morally suspect, being to blame for your situation and wrongly claiming benefits or taking charity.

• 3. Institutional stigma – being treated badly by service providers, feeling humiliated by the process of claiming benefits or accessing other services.

All of these come up again and again among people in poverty, especially those with experience of the social security system and people using food banks. The 2012 study found that around three in ten of those with experience of claiming benefits had experienced moderate or high personal stigma, nearly half reported feeling social stigma and a whopping 85 per cent experienced institutional stigma.

Health studies have linked these feelings of shame and stigma to increased mental and physical health problems. A review (Elliott 2016) of the links between mental health and poverty highlighted the impact on young people's mental health. It found that “chronic exposure to poverty increases adolescents’ risks for developing conditions such as depression, and behavioural risks such as substance use, early sexual behaviour and criminal activity”. Girls were more likely to become depressed and boys to drink too much. Tellingly, it cited the impact of “a sense of helplessness and feelings of shame and inferiority”.

Many studies have documented the feelings of humiliation and distress felt by some benefit claimants, both because of media portrayals of them (social stigma) and the way they have been treated when claiming social security (institutional stigma):

Q: How are benefits claimants seen?

Alan: OK, ermm, parasites, skivers, work-shy, lazy, stupid, Feckless.

Work should be a reliable route out of poverty, but the majority of people in poverty are now in working families; seven in ten children growing up in poverty live in a working family; and four million workers (about one in eight) live in poverty (Innes 2020). This is in spite of the UK's employment rate hitting an all-time high in the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the UK having one of the highest minimum hourly wages in the world. Over the last 20 years, the risk of living in working poverty has risen, particularly during two periods of time: in the five years leading up to the Great Recession in 2008 and in the recovery from that recession, from 2012 onwards. Three factors drove this sorry situation: earnings, housing costs and social security.

JOBS AND EARNINGS

During the first period of rising in-work poverty, from 2003/04 to the recession in 2008, earnings grew more slowly for those at the bottom than they did in the middle. At the same time, housing costs rose faster for those on low incomes than the better off. During the 2008 recession, earnings fell fastest for low-income families as employers cut back their hours, but they were protected by the tax and benefit system and so in-work poverty again stayed flat (falling housing costs helped both those on low and middle incomes so didn't affect the poverty levels). The recovery from 2012/13 onwards saw earnings grow at about the same rate for low-income families as they did for those in the middle, but rising housing costs hit those at the bottom hard and swingeing cuts to benefits pulled hundreds of thousands into poverty.

It might seem strange that earnings for those at the bottom weren't outstripping those in the middle, given that the rising minimum wage meant that hourly pay did go up more at the bottom than higher up.