When John Smith set up the Commission on Social Justice, he explained that he wanted an independent, comprehensive review of the welfare state 50 years on from the famous Beveridge Report that inspired its creation.
Living standards for most people in this country had, of course, improved considerably since Beveridge but the Five Great Evils that he described as standing in the way of postwar reconstruction – Want, Idleness, Squalor, Ignorance and Disease – were still self-evidently with us.
Our report, Social Justice – Strategies for National Renewal, was published in October 1994. A few months after publication, the Prime Minister (John Major) said: ‘I have read the Commission’s Report. I recommend it to insomniacs.’ One can sympathise with Mr Major. The 400 pages of our report were a solid read but its essence was the vision, the values and the objectives that we set out quite briefly. The book of Proverbs, chapter 24, verse 18 says, ‘Where there is no vision, the people shall perish.’ But without a pragmatic approach, including what is affordable, the vision may not be attained.
Less than three years later, a Labour government was elected with a massive majority. Since then, our report has been used as a source book for the long-term strategy of the government, numerous of its aims and practical approaches have been put into effect, and key members of the Commission became ‘movers and shakers’ in the new administration – Patricia Hewitt and David Miliband became ministers and Chris Haskins became ‘Mr Task Force’, chairing various advisory bodies.
One of our Commission’s basic propositions on Social justice was that the welfare state should develop from being a safety net to being a springboard for economic opportunity and that the availability of paid work for a fair wage (and we did favour a statutory minimum wage) seemed the most secure and sustainable way out of poverty. Many of the Labour government’s policies, legislating for a minimum wage, achieving a high level of employment, and the New Deal programme for taking people ‘out of welfare into work’, echoed our own themes.
We urged the need to provide real choices across the life cycle so people could choose the amount of time they spend on paid work, family, education, leisure and retirement. Subsequent government initiatives on maternity and paternity leave and making progress towards greater freedom to choose one’s retirement date clearly respond to those ideas.
It was not popular to prefer top-ups for pensioners in the greatest poverty rather than raising the basic pension for all. The left has an atavistic adverse reaction to anything that involves means-testing. But we on the Commission (and the government) knew that as higher proportions of our people invest in occupational and private pensions, then for the state to pay out marginal increases for that group (at huge cost) was not the best way of achieving social justice for the elderly poor.
Social justice requires difficult choices to be made by government, not only for increasing numbers of elderly people but also, for example, for our large numbers of university students. It seemed to us unfair and unjust if well-paid graduates (and most graduates are much better paid than non-graduates over a lifetime) did not contribute something back in their later years for the benefit and good fortune of having a university education.
The Commission’s report, in my view, was a seminal and timely piece of work, giving well-founded principles, objectives and guidance to future Labour governments. It has proved its worth.