Want

Poverty in modern-day Britain looks different to the form it took in Beveridge’s day but it has not disappeared. For 14 million people across the UK the lack of access to the goods and services necessary to live a decent life and to participate fully in society remains a grim reality. Despite rising standards of living, social and economic structures continue to trap those at the bottom in constant job insecurity, ill-health, overcrowded housing and educational disadvantage. Helen Barnard considers what it might take to finally slay the giant of poverty in Britain. She examines how we might build a fairer, more equal society, and what a modern welfare state should aim to achieve, including an honest appraisal of the trade-offs and choices involved in creating it.

A tour d’horizon of social injustice in Britain today – and a twenty-first-century manifesto for rooting it out. At every turn, she presses not only the question of what substantively will have to be done to slay the giant of 'want', but asks how can we foster the political conversation that is a prerequisite for getting it done. Her demand for meaningful public deliberation, not least with those who are on the wrong end of anachronistic top-down services, is an urgent one – not only for social policy, but for the wider health of our democracy too., At times painful, but also painfully needed, this updating of Beveridge shines a light on what poverty looks like in twenty-first-century Britain. Barnard encourages us to ask what we want for the UK’s future, and rightly suggests it is not just more of the status quo., A clear, perceptive and timely discussion of poverty in the UK that for all its authority never loses sight of a key question: how did we, as a society that prides itself on being compassionate and just, get here?, Helen Barnard distills all her extensive expertise on modern poverty into this book – the result is a vital primer for anyone thinking of having an opinion on this subject., Helen Barnard is consistently one of the most interesting thinkers on social policy in Britain, even when – or perhaps especially when – you disagree with her.

Helen Barnard combines her work as Associate Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, with her role as Research and Policy Director at Pro Bono Economics.