Beveridge and his Assumptive Worlds: The Incompatibilities of a Flawed Design1

Abstract No historical document is cited more frequently in postwar social policy debate than the Beveridge Report (Beveridge 1942). The last official review of the UK social security system described itself as the most fundamental ‘since Beveridge’. The most thoroughgoing independent review of taxes and benefits, the Meade Committee (1978), advocated ‘a new Beveridge Scheme’ (pp. 269--94). Critics lay the blame for what they see as the failure of social security in the UK since the Second World War at Beveridge’s door (Dilnot, Kay, and Morris 1984). Feminists (Wilson 1977; Pierce 1980; Land 1976) have attacked the gendered assumptions of women’s dependency built into the resulting system.