William Beveridge

For other people named William Beveridge, see William Beveridge (disambiguation).

The Lord Beveridge
Lord Beveridge.
Born	(1879-03-05)5 March 1879 Rangpur, India (now Bangladesh)
Died	16 March 1963(1963-03-16) (aged 84) Oxford, Oxfordshire, England.
Nationality	British
Education	Charterhouse School and Balliol College, Oxford.
Occupation	Economist
Known for	Work towards founding Britain's welfare state.
Spouse	Jessy Janet Philip OBE (d. 1959)

William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge KCB (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and social reformer. He is perhaps best known for his 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) which served as the basis for the post-World War II Welfare State put in place by the Labour government.

Early life and career

Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and scholar Annette (Akroyd) Beveridge, was born in Rangpur, India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879. After studying at Charterhouse School and Balliol College, Oxford, he became a lawyer.

Beveridge became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he joined the Board of Trade, and helped organise the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance, with the goal of combating poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.

In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists — in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report — that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Cannan and Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots.

In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent German Jewish academics escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.

Beveridge in the 1910s.

Wartime work

Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.

An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.

The Report to the Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the five 'Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.

One of its most remarkable assets was the convincing manner of Beveridge's argument which made it so widely acceptable: Beveridge appealed to conservatives and other doubters by arguing that the welfare institutions he proposed would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account, but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.

Beveridge saw full employment (which he defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 Beveridge Report, and Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) expressed how this goal might be gained. Alternative measures for achieving it included Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.

Later career

A second report, Full Employment in a Free Society, appeared in 1944. Later that year, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July, 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed until the 1945 general election.

The following year the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in the 1945 general election. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide 'social security' so that the population would be protected from the 'cradle to the grave'. The new system was partly built on the National Insurance scheme set up by Lloyd George in 1911.

In 1946 Beveridge was raised to the peerage as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953).

Support for eugenics

Beveridge was a proponent of Eugenics. He argued in 1909 that "those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry, are to be recognised as 'unemployable'. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State... but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights — including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood."

Personal life

Lord Beveridge married Jessy Janet, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words, as he sat up in bed whilst still working on his 'History of Prices', were "I have a thousand things to do".

Works

• Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909.
• Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
• Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (Beveridge Report) - excerpts available from Modern History Sourcebook.
• Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
• The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
• Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
• Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G D H Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L F Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).

See also

• Beveridge curve
• Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
• Socialism
• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory
• List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service

Resources

• Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0198206852.
• William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
• Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
• Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.

External links

• Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
• An "Executive Summary" of the 300-page Beveridge Report
• BBC information
• BBC Radio 4, Great Lives - Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
• Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
• Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives