The Beveridge Report

On 1 December 1942 His Majesty’s Stationery Office published a government paper with the dry title Social Insurance and Allied Services, numbered Cmd. 6404. The text of nearly three hundred pages was signed by one man, the economist and long-serving director of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge. The report, known from then on simply as the Beveridge Report, proposed replacing the chaotic patchwork of pre-war insurance schemes with a single universal system that would protect every citizen throughout life – “from the cradle to the grave”, as people soon began to say. In a country that had lived for three years with rationing, under the bombs and in the shadow of defeat, it became a publishing sensation. According to contemporary accounts, queues formed outside the Stationery Office bookshop in High Holborn, London, and the first printing sold out that same day.

Such a momentous reception was unprecedented for an official publication. The report was neither a bill nor a statement of government policy, but the proposal of a single expert. Yet it was this report, more than any other wartime document, that set the shape of post-war Britain.

A committee meant to be technical

In June 1941 Arthur Greenwood, the Labour minister without portfolio responsible in Winston Churchill’s coalition government for planning post-war reconstruction, announced the creation of an interdepartmental committee. It was to survey the existing social insurance schemes – from pensions and unemployment benefit to workmen’s compensation for industrial accidents – and propose how to rationalise them. It was made up of officials from a dozen or so ministries and departments, and Beveridge became its chairman.

The appointment was partly a way of getting rid of an awkward man. Beveridge, a distinguished civil servant from the time of the pre-war reforms of the Liberal government in which Churchill and David Lloyd George had served, and a co-founder of Britain’s first labour exchanges, had hoped in 1940 for a leading role in the mobilisation of manpower. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, did not want him in his department, however, and chairing the committee looked like a technical, second-rank job. Beveridge accepted it reluctantly, as something that drew him away from manpower questions, but he soon saw an opportunity in it. Within a few months he had sketched the outline of a grand plan, before the committee had even heard any witnesses. As his conception went far beyond the committee’s remit, the government decided at the beginning of 1942 that the officials would act only as advisers and that the report would be signed by the chairman alone. As a result the document did not formally commit any ministry, but it also fully expressed its author’s views.

Over the course of 1942 the committee gathered hundreds of memoranda and heard dozens of organisations: trade unions, friendly societies, insurance companies, doctors. Beveridge, supported by his collaborator and future wife, Janet (Jessy) Mair, née Philip, made sure that the press wrote about the committee’s work. In the spring of 1942 the government also drew on his expertise in another matter: Beveridge prepared a plan for rationing coal, gas and electricity, which provoked a revolt among Conservative MPs and ended in a compromise in the form of state control over the coal industry. The insurance report, however, was his principal work. In November the finished text went to the government.

Five giants

The report opened with three guiding principles. The first was that proposals for the future should not be restricted by sectional interests, and that wartime was no time for patching up the old: “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.” The second was that social insurance was only one part of a wider policy of social progress. In the document’s most famous passage, Beveridge wrote that Want was only one of five giants on the road of reconstruction, and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others were Disease, Ignorance, Squalor (meaning wretched housing conditions) and Idleness – that is, unemployment. The third principle stated that social security should be achieved by cooperation between the state and the individual: the state should secure a minimum, but should not stifle initiative or discourage people from saving above that minimum.

The plan itself was concerned above all with the fight against Want. Beveridge proposed a single compulsory and universal insurance scheme for all citizens regardless of income, with one fund and one Ministry of Social Security in place of dozens of institutions. He listed six principles: a flat-rate benefit at subsistence level, a flat-rate contribution, unified administration, adequate benefits, comprehensive coverage of all risks and all people, and classification of the insured into categories (employees, the self-employed, housewives, other adults, children, the retired). Everyone would pay the same weekly contribution, stuck as before in the form of a stamp on an insurance card, and in the event of sickness, unemployment, disability, widowhood or old age would receive the same benefit, without a humiliating inquiry into their income. The pre-war means test, under which officials counted up the possessions of unemployed families, had been one of the most hated institutions in the country in the 1930s.

The report also gave specific, if provisional, rates. A married couple deprived of earnings by unemployment or incapacity was to receive 40 shillings a week, and a family with two children 56 shillings, with no means test. On top of this came a funeral grant, a maternity grant and a one-off marriage grant. Means-tested national assistance was to remain only a safety net for the few who fell through the system.

The plan rested on three assumptions without which – the author wrote – no insurance scheme could work. Assumption A: children’s allowances, averaging about 8 shillings a week per child, paid to working families as well (in that case from the second child). Assumption B: comprehensive health and rehabilitation services for the whole population, free at the point of use. Assumption C: the maintenance of employment and the avoidance of mass unemployment, since no fund could bear the cost of benefits for three million unemployed, as at the beginning of the 1930s. These three assumptions, especially the promise of universal health care and full employment, went far beyond a technical rationalisation of insurance, and it was they that most fired readers’ imaginations.

A cool reception in the government

In the War Cabinet the report aroused mixed feelings. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, believed it represented “an impracticable financial commitment” and proposed delaying publication. The Treasury feared that after the war the country would be indebted and impoverished, and that permanent benefits for the whole of society would prove unaffordable. Some Conservatives saw the plan as a harbinger of socialism, and employers and insurance companies feared losing their market. On the other hand the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, a close associate of the Prime Minister, argued that suppressing a document the press had been writing about for months would be a propaganda disaster. In the end, at the end of November, the government agreed to publish the report as an official command paper, without committing itself to implementing it.

Churchill, absorbed in running the war, did not reject the idea of social insurance – as a young minister in 1908–1911 he had himself helped shape the Liberal government’s reforms, including the first unemployment insurance. But he did not want to take on, in wartime, commitments whose cost was unknown. In a note to the Cabinet at the beginning of 1943 he warned against raising “false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and Eldorado”. The Labour members of the coalition, on the other hand, pressed for the plan’s speedy adoption, above all the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, although Bevin, a trade unionist through and through, regarded Beveridge’s ideas with considerable reserve.

An official bestseller

The report, sold for two shillings, became an instant bestseller. According to available estimates, some 100,000 copies were sold in the first month, and by early 1944 more than 600,000 copies of the full text and of a cheaper abridged version. Several tens of thousands of copies were bought in the United States. The press greeted it with enthusiasm: The Times wrote of a “momentous document” that must have a profound and immediate influence on the direction of social change, the Manchester Guardian called it “a big and fine thing”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, said that it was the first time anyone had tried to embody the spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament. Beveridge, who did not shun publicity, gave interviews and lectures and appeared on the radio and in newsreels.

Opinion research confirmed the scale of the interest. According to Mass-Observation, a clear majority of those questioned had heard of the report the day after its publication, and a poll by the British Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup) carried out within two weeks found that 95 per cent of respondents had heard of it and an overwhelming majority wanted it implemented. The Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence reports noted that the report had been received with almost universal approval among all sections of society as the first serious attempt to give substance to the talk of a “new world”. The main criticism was that the pensions were too low.

The document’s popularity reached the armed forces. The Army Bureau of Current Affairs, which prepared discussion material for soldiers, issued a bulletin on the report in December, but the War Office withdrew it after a few days, on the grounds that the Beveridge plan was the private opinion of its author and not government policy. In January and February 1943 the affair prompted questions in both Houses of Parliament, and many soldiers saw it as proof that someone was trying to take away their hope of a better post-war world.

Echoes abroad

The report quickly became a weapon in the propaganda war. The Ministry of Information distributed summaries of it in the armed forces and abroad, and according to British studies abridged versions were also dropped over occupied Europe. The governments-in-exile in London, the Polish one among them, followed the debate closely, and articles about the plan circulated in the underground press of the occupied countries. For the British it was an argument that democracy could offer its citizens not only “blood, toil, tears and sweat” but also a fairer order after the war.

The propaganda of the Third Reich could not pass over the report in silence. Guidelines for Party speakers issued at the end of December 1942 instructed them to point out that Germany had had social insurance since the days of Otto von Bismarck, and to present the plan as a propaganda trick intended to keep the British fighting. Behind the scenes, however, German officials studied it seriously. According to an often-repeated though poorly documented account, German studies of the report were found in Hitler’s bunker in 1945. The report also influenced debates in Allied countries – in Canada it inspired Leonard Marsh’s report on social security, prepared in 1943.

From debate to the welfare state

It soon became clear that public enthusiasm did not automatically translate into government decisions. In February 1943 the House of Commons debated the report for three days. The government declared that it accepted it in principle, but would not commit itself to legislation before the end of the war, when the country’s financial position would be known. This led to one of the largest parliamentary rebellions of the war: 121 MPs voted against the government, including 97 Labour members, who defied their own ministers in the coalition. Among those voting against was David Lloyd George – it was his last vote in the House of Commons. A group of younger Conservatives, for their part, formed the Tory Reform Committee, which demanded swift action.

The government eventually seized the initiative. In March 1943, in a radio broadcast, Churchill announced a post-war “Four Years’ Plan”, including compulsory national insurance for all classes “from the cradle to the grave”, and in 1944–1945 the coalition published a series of white papers: on a national health service, on employment policy and on social insurance. The Family Allowances Act was passed in 1945. The actual implementation of the plan, however, fell to Attlee’s Labour government, which won the election in July 1945 on a promise to slay the “five giants”. The National Insurance Act (1946), the National Health Service Act (1946) and the National Assistance Act (1948) built the modern British welfare state, and on 5 July 1948 the National Health Service (NHS) came into operation. On more than one point the Labour government departed from the original assumptions: it built a centralised, state-run health service, and it did not keep to the principle that insurance benefits should be enough to live on, so that many pensioners had to rely on means-tested assistance anyway. Beveridge himself, who had become a Liberal MP in 1944, lost his seat in the 1945 election.

Place in the war

The Beveridge Report appeared at a particular moment. Three weeks earlier Churchill, celebrating the victory at El Alamein, had spoken of “the end of the beginning”, and the Americans were landing in North Africa. For the first time since 1939 the British could think not only about survival but also about what the country would look like after victory. The memory of the 1930s – of mass unemployment, hunger marches, means tests and malnutrition in the industrial districts – was still vivid. The evacuation of children from the cities in 1939 had shown the better-off part of society the scale of poverty in working-class districts, and food rationing and free milk for children had, paradoxically, improved the diet of the poorest. Many Britons did not want a repetition after this war of the story of 1918, when the promised “land fit for heroes” had turned out to be an empty slogan.

The report gave these expectations a concrete shape and became one of the most important texts of the “home front”. For the government it was also an argument in the ideological war: democratic Britain could set against the Nazi promise of a “national community” a programme of social security founded on the rights of the citizen rather than on race and obedience. The argument over the pace of its implementation largely determined the political climate of the last years of the war. Most historians believe that Labour’s credibility on the Beveridge plan was one of the reasons for its election victory in 1945, and that the report itself was one of the foundations of the post-war consensus that shaped British politics for three decades. Beveridge, as it happens, disliked the term “welfare state” and preferred to speak of the “social service state”, but it is his name that has remained permanently linked with that era.