Which one of the following is the correct set of contingencies identified by William Beveridge in his comprehensive social security scheme?

Correct — A, (a) Want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. These are the five giants of the Beveridge Report — the report properly titled Social Insurance and Allied Services, Command Paper 6404, which Sir William Beveridge published in November 1942. He described them as five giants on the road of reconstruction, and the whole architecture of the post-war British welfare state was organised as an attack on them, one instrument to each giant: social insurance against want, a national health service against disease, universal education against ignorance, housing against squalor, and full employment policy against idleness.

The list is memorable because it is not a list of insurance branches. Beveridge could have written unemployment, sickness, old age and widowhood, which is what a social insurance actuary would write. He wrote instead the five conditions that keep a society poor, two of which — ignorance and squalor — no contributory scheme can insure against at all. That is the point of the list and it is the reason it survived him.

Each of the three wrong options is the true list with one or two members swapped out for something that sounds equally plausible, so the item cannot be answered by recognising a general shape; it has to be answered by holding all five words. A mnemonic helps: the five run from the material to the social and back — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness. Note that the paper’s word ’contingencies’ is looser than Beveridge’s own. He also drew up a separate list of the primary causes of need, which includes unemployment, disability, loss of livelihood, retirement, the marriage needs of a woman, funeral expenses, childhood and physical disease or incapacity; but the five-item list the four options are built from is the list of giants, and option (a) reproduces it exactly.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)Want, sickness, disability, squalor and idleness — Two substitutions. ’Sickness’ replaces disease and ’disability’ replaces ignorance. Sickness for disease looks harmless — the words are near-synonyms in ordinary speech — but it is a giveaway of a different register: sickness is what a contributory scheme pays for, disease is a social condition to be abolished, and Beveridge chose the second word deliberately. Disability, meanwhile, quietly removes the giant that is hardest to insure against. Once ignorance goes, the list stops being an argument for universal education and becomes an ordinary benefits schedule, which is exactly the transformation Beveridge was arguing against.
• (c)Want, disease, old age, squalor and unemployment — Here ’old age’ replaces ignorance and ’unemployment’ replaces idleness. Both substitutions turn a social evil into an insurable contingency, and both are the kind of thing a candidate supplies from memory of what social insurance covers rather than from memory of what Beveridge wrote. Idleness and unemployment are especially worth separating: unemployment is a status a person is in, and it is compensated; idleness is the waste of human capacity that Beveridge wanted full employment policy to abolish. The whole force of the five giants is that they name what is to be destroyed, not what is to be paid for.
• (d)Disease, invalidity, old age, unemployment and ignorance — This option keeps only two of the five — disease and ignorance — and replaces want, squalor and idleness with invalidity, old age and unemployment. It is the furthest of the four from the real list and reads most obviously like a schedule of insurance branches, which is what makes it a useful contrast: place it beside option (a) and the difference between a list of contingencies and a list of social evils is visible at a glance. Note also that it drops Want, which stands first in Beveridge’s own ordering and is the giant that social insurance was principally designed to attack.

Sir William Beveridge, an economist and civil servant, was asked in 1941 to chair an inter-departmental committee on the co-ordination of social insurance in Britain. What he produced in November 1942 went far beyond that remit. Social Insurance and Allied Services proposed a unified, contributory, universal scheme covering the whole population from cradle to grave, financed by a single weekly flat-rate contribution from workers, employers and the state, and paying flat-rate subsistence benefits as of right rather than after a means test. He framed the case as an attack on five giants on the road of reconstruction — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness — and made the plan conditional on three assumptions: family allowances, a comprehensive health service, and the maintenance of full employment. The report sold in extraordinary numbers for a government paper and became the blueprint of the post-war welfare state, delivered through the Family Allowances Act 1945, the National Insurance Act 1946, the National Health Service Act 1946 and the National Assistance Act 1948. Its influence on Indian thinking was direct: B. P. Adarkar was commissioned in March 1943 to report on health insurance for Indian industrial workers, and India’s own social security legislation of 1948 and 1952 took shape in the atmosphere Beveridge had created.

Key facts

• Beveridge’s five giants are Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
• He called them ’five giants on the road of reconstruction’.
• The report is titled Social Insurance and Allied Services, Command Paper 6404, published in November 1942.
• It proposed a unified, universal, contributory scheme paying flat-rate subsistence benefits as of right, financed by flat-rate contributions from workers, employers and the state.
• Its three assumptions were family allowances, a comprehensive health service and the maintenance of full employment.
• Beveridge separately listed the primary causes of need — unemployment, disability, loss of livelihood, retirement, the marriage needs of a woman, funeral expenses, childhood, and physical disease or incapacity.
• The report became the basis of the British welfare state, delivered through the Family Allowances Act 1945, the National Insurance Act 1946, the National Health Service Act 1946 and the National Assistance Act 1948.
• Two of the five giants, ignorance and squalor, cannot be met by any contributory insurance scheme, which is why the report also required education and housing policy.

Common traps

• Substituting ’sickness’ for ’disease’ or ’unemployment’ for ’idleness’. Beveridge’s words name social evils, not insurable contingencies, and the examiner tests exactly that swap.
• Dropping ignorance or squalor because they seem out of place in a social security list. They are the two that make the list an argument rather than a schedule.
• Attributing the five giants to the ILO or to the Universal Declaration. They are Beveridge’s, and they are British and from 1942.
• Confusing the five giants with Beveridge’s separate list of the primary causes of need, which does read like an insurance schedule.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Beveridge Report of 1942 is properly titled

  • (a)Social Insurance and Allied Services
  • (b)The Prevention of Destitution
  • (c)Full Employment in a Free Society
  • (d)Report on Social Security for Canada

  Answer(a) Social Insurance and Allied Services

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of Beveridge’s five giants was to be attacked principally by a policy of full employment?

  • (a)Want
  • (b)Squalor
  • (c)Idleness
  • (d)Ignorance

  Answer(c) Idleness