William Beveridge's 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services proposed a comprehensive, cradle-to-grave system of social insurance to combat what it called the 'five giants' of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. A bestseller in wartime Britain, it became the blueprint for the post-war welfare state, including national insurance and the National Health Service. Its diagnosis of 'squalor' singled out poor housing and slum conditions as a target for state action. The model was widely emulated across post-war Western Europe.
It defined the modern welfare state that was copied across much of Western Europe. Its attack on 'squalor' justified large-scale public housing, slum clearance and the planned new towns of the post-war decades, directly reshaping urban form.
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