In my experience, this book is a unique event. I am delighted to have been invited to write a foreword to it.

I invited the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Tony Blair MP, to give a lecture on ‘Beveridge re-visited: a welfare state for the 21st century’ to launch a lecture series commemorating the 750th anniversary of the endowment of University College, Oxford – the oldest recorded foundation of higher education in the English-speaking world.

The grounds for the invitation were that William Beveridge wrote his report of 1942 while he was Master of University College. He was assisted in its preparation by Harold Wilson, then a Fellow of University College and afterwards Labour Prime Minister, and the report was implemented under the 1945-51 government led by Clement Attlee, also an Old Member of University College.

It was appropriate that Attlee’s and Wilson’s successor as Prime Minister and leader of a government pledged to the reform of the welfare state should review Beveridge’s achievement and describe the approach of his own government.

This was bound to be an important occasion, and the Prime Minister and his advisers took it seriously. Tony Blair had not spoken extensively on the subject as Prime Minister and it provided an opportunity to set out his thinking at an early stage of his government.

The importance of this book is that it includes a range of contributions by distinguished experts in the field which were available to the Prime Minister when his lecture was being prepared. It is therefore possible not only to read the ideas of leading current thinkers in this crucial area of policy but also to compare them with the Prime Minister’s lecture, and see which ideas he himself took up and in what form.

This is what makes the book unique. In due course it will be possible to see also the fate of the approach in the Prime Minister’s lecture – the extent to which it was implemented and the extent to which it was effective. Meanwhile, this book is a record not only of the lecture itself but also of the ideas available to the government and their influence on its leader at an important moment in the formation of policy.