At last, we have reached the future! In this chapter, I think about possible welfare futures in the light of everything that has gone before and in the shadow of the challenges that lie ahead. I should begin by reiterating this key point: unless we experience a catastrophe that makes our present way of life unsustainable (and in which all bets are off), the welfare state is not going to disappear. Into the foreseeable future, whoever governs, we shall have a large state that uses the dynamics of taxing and spending to redirect resources to services and benefits for (especially its older) citizens. Here I am concerned with the much narrower, but also much more difficult, question of what a welfare regime that constituted some sort of ‘strategy for equality’ could look like. I begin by looking at three of the biggest challenges that we currently face. I then turn briefly to some of the most widely canvassed ‘solutions’ that are already out there. Finally, I raise some more radical alternatives which have the virtue, for me, of squaring up resolutely to the difficult but unavoidable question of who owns what – and of how we might change that. How all of this might be impacted by COVID-19 is the topic of a separate chapter.

It is now some 25 years since Paul Pierson alerted us to the coming age of ‘permanent austerity’ in developed welfare states (Pierson, 1998). For him, this had three key components: slowed economic growth (associated with the expansion of the service sector of the economy); a sort of ‘growth to limits’ in existing governmental commitments to welfare; and the ageing of the population. All three of these developments have had an impact upon the kind of social democratic strategies we considered in Chapter 3, not least because virtually all social democrats came to believe that economic growth could and should be used to finesse the distributional conflicts associated with growth in the generosity of welfare states. It is a serious problem if this is no longer an option. I begin here with the third element singled out by Paul Pierson: the (continuing) demographic challenge.