In the closing fifteen years of the nineteenth century, Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree carried out large-scale surveys of London and York, respectively. They were motivated by widely disputed claims that 25% of the population were poor—an issue that was seen as a matter of great significance because of not only what it said about the way the spoils of industrialization and economic growth had been shared but also the scenes of social unrest, which had become familiar during the 1880s. Booth and Rowntree both concluded that the 25% claim was wrong; the real figure was actually closer to 30%. By the start of the First World War, and in response to concern about findings such as these, the state had taken on significant new responsibilities, with the country’s first means-tested old-age pension and a National Insurance scheme, offering unemployment and health benefits to those who were eligible to enroll, among the most prominent. As Pat Thane argues in this new book, a lot has changed since the turn of the twentieth century, not least beliefs about what the state can achieve, if it is prepared to direct sufficient resources at problems, yet levels of poverty remain broadly the same.

The Rise and Fall of the British Welfare State: From Poverty in 1900 to Poverty in 2023 provides a high-level survey of the evolution of the modern British welfare state. The book takes us from the first extensions of state's social responsibilities, which sat on top of the Poor Law and were intended to help the old and male industrial workers, groups seen as particularly vulnerable to poverty because of low or irregular incomes, through the mid-twentieth-century, when something recognized as a “welfare state” was created, to events of the past decade, when there have been far-reaching, though seldom successful, efforts to fulfil late-twentieth-century ambitions to scale back commitments and spending. Thane covers all the major landmarks and developments you would expect to find in a book of this kind: the reforming Liberal government of the first decade of the 1900s; the impact of two world wars; the post-war Attlee administration; affluence and the “rediscovery of poverty” during the 1960s; and the reshaping of the state and society by neoliberalism after 1979.

As Thane’s account shows, the history of the welfare state requires a discussion of an incredibly wide range of topics. To be sure, one must chart the creation, extension, or withdrawal of this or that benefit or service. Yet the very idea of a welfare state—indeed, the term itself has been a matter of debate, with William Beveridge, among many others, resisting the label—requires thinking about a much broader range of issues. House building, education, health care, and economic policy all feature in most people’s understanding of what the welfare state is. But, as Thane shows, so too should things like cultural change, legal aid, and immigration policy, with the latter a particularly important aspect of bridging the gap between the quality of public services that the electorate are believed to expect and the level of taxation that politicians believed they were willing to bear during the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Indeed, the relationship between welfare state and democracy is no less important, with the emergence of the conception of welfare rights during the 1960s reflecting a growing belief that the contributory principle that was integral to the Beveridgean conception of social security actually marginalized many groups, including single mothers and the disabled.

Most of this story will be well-known to historians of modern Britain. However, Thane makes an important contribution to the field by providing an account that reaches the present day. We are now at a point where we can start thinking about how to define the past 15 years, which, for all the chaos at almost every level of politics in Britain, thanks to Brexit, Covid, and disunity of the governing Conservative party, does have a general coherence as the post-financial crash era of austerity. The period has been characterized by widespread retrenchment, with services, particularly those delivered by local authorities, starved of funds by successive administrations. But there have been reforms too; most notably Universal Credit, which has rolled together a number of benefits but which has never been clearly defined as either a genuine innovation requiring investment or a cost-saving measure. As Thane argues, though, the really striking thing about this history is that the problems of the early twenty-first century—most obviously the fact that most people in poverty are also in work—were central motivations for beginning to create a welfare state 100 years earlier. The reasons the problem has persisted are up for debate and it is important to remember that a golden age in which problems such as these were solved has never existed. Yet, as Thane suggests, somewhat bleakly, recent developments support the view that the withdrawal of support in areas where people had come to expect it has only served to restore a state of affairs that was once considered unconscionable.