Historical figure · Pearson Edexcel International GCSE revision on Incandio

William Beveridge

Five Giants on the Road · Social Reformer · 1879–1963

The economist and reformer whose 1942 report on social insurance named the five giants — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness — and became the blueprint for the post-war welfare state, including the assumption of a National Health Service.

Why Beveridge is on Incandio

Incandio is a free revision platform for the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE. Its historical figures are the people a student learns from, questions and — where a specification topic is theirs — defends an idea against. William Beveridge can be questioned here in a dramatised, historically grounded portrayal, and the five-chapter life below is written to be read alongside the course.

Who was Beveridge?

Beveridge was born in 1879 at Rangpur in Bengal, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service. After Balliol College, Oxford, he worked at Toynbee Hall in the East End and wrote on unemployment. At the Board of Trade under Churchill he set up labour exchanges in 1909 and designed the unemployment insurance in the 1911 National Insurance Act. He was Director of the London School of Economics (1919–37) and Master of University College, Oxford. In 1941 he was asked to chair a committee on social insurance and produced Social Insurance and Allied Services, published on 1 December 1942. It proposed a single system of flat-rate contributions and benefits, and assumed family allowances, a comprehensive health service and full employment. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The coalition government's response was cautious, but after 1945 the Attlee government built much of the welfare state on its foundations. Beveridge was briefly a Liberal MP (1944–45), became a peer in 1946, and died in Oxford in 1963.

Major achievements

• Set up labour exchanges (1909) and designed unemployment insurance (1911)
• Wrote the 1942 Beveridge Report, the blueprint for the welfare state
• Identified the five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness
• Made a comprehensive health service one of the report's three assumptions
• Argued for full employment in Full Employment in a Free Society (1944)

Life in brief

• 1879 — Born in Rangpur, Bengal: 5 March, in British India.
• 1903 — Sub-warden of Toynbee Hall: Sees East End poverty at first hand.
• 1909 — Labour exchanges: Set up at the Board of Trade under Churchill.
• 1919 — Director of the LSE: Serves until 1937.
• 1942 — The Beveridge Report: Published 1 December; the five giants.
• 1944 — Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed: Loses the seat in 1945.
• 1963 — Dies in Oxford: 16 March.

Explore the life of Beveridge — five chapters

1. From Bengal to the East End — A privileged young man meets poverty
2. Labour Exchanges and Insurance — Working for Churchill and the Liberal government
3. Director of the LSE — An administrator between the wars
4. The Five Giants — The report that queues formed to buy
5. Whose Welfare State? — A Liberal plan built by a Labour government

Read the five-chapter life of William Beveridge →

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