Beveridge was clear that maintaining full employment was necessary to his plan. It was a good in itself but was also vital to make the welfare state affordable and ensure workers would only need their unemployment payments for short periods. All that is still true, but the problems we now face in our labour market have changed.

Mass unemployment, although not necessarily gone for ever, has ceased to be the big challenge facing us. After the Great Recession and before Covid-19, the employment rate recovered amazingly strongly, but more and more workers were still pulled into poverty. The big issues now are low pay, lack of progression, insecurity and underemployment. Our central concern should be the quality of work that those at the lower end of the labour market are able to get, not just how many people have a job. So how do we prevent workers getting stuck in low-quality jobs?

One answer is to improve their skills and qualifications so that individuals can compete more effectively for better work and move employer to increase their pay, security and treatment. That is certainly necessary. The majority of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds reach the age of 16 without the baseline of five good GCSEs or their equivalent. The gap in attainment between children from richer and poorer families has remained stubbornly large and the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out a decade's worth of (very modest) progress in narrowing it (Education Endowment Foundation 2021). Five million adults lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Accessing the next stages of education and getting a decent start in your working life is incredibly difficult without these basics.

Once adults are in the labour market, those with low levels of qualifications are far less likely to then get further training from employers than those who already have higher qualifications. The payback for doing training as an adult, in terms of getting better work or higher pay, is uncertain and very variable depending on the qualification, sector and where in the country you are. The barriers to low-paid workers getting more qualifications without the support of their employers are high; many people experience difficulties with finding the time to study when also working and caring, avoiding falling foul of benefit conditions or facing unacceptable hardship or debt if they try to reduce current work to allow training.