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In Looking At The Beveridge Report, One Of The Most Contentious Historical ...

In looking at the Beveridge report, one of the most contentious historical debates is the extent to which his report was implemented by the Attlee Labour Government. Differing perspectives have been offered, and the argument centres on if you consider the question from the standpoint of principles and objectives, or if you view the question from the position of detail. There seems little doubt in my own mind that the implementation of the Beveridge Report was carried out in the spirit of Beveridge. The underlying principles were as Beveridge would have envisaged. What is also clear to me is that if we look at the fine detail of the implementation, then what transpired differed it some quite important ways was the plan laid down by Beveridge. The objective of this chapter is therefore to look at why and how the details were changed, but also to see how the spirit of Beveridge lived on in the process of implementation.
In an article,' An End to the Means Test? Social Security and the Attlee Government,' Alan Deacon has suggested that:
It is well known that the post-war Labour government did not implement fully the ‘plan for social security' outlined in the Beveridge report of 1942. The central feature of that plan was a comprehensive scheme of social insurance against interruption or loss of earnings due to old age, unemployment, sickness or disability. The benefits provided under the insurance scheme were to be adequate for subsistence, and this would ensure that means tested national assistance would play only a minor role.(1)
Whilst I would not disagree with Deacons's eventual conclusions in this article, I do disagree with his premise that the Labour Governments deviation from this plan was well known. Maybe among historians and political scientists, this was well known, but I would question if the public at large were really aware of the extent of the deviations. They would not have known because the deviation was in the detail, not in the objectives, and when the acts were rolled out in 1946, and 1948, they were done so under the banner of the implementation of the Beveridge report. As we are aware from earlier chapters, public opinion research suggested that people were not fully aware of the detail of the report, only the essential aims of the report. I would therefore suggest that when the legislation was introduced with significant changes having been made, it is unlikely that the majority of people would have been aware of the extent of the changes.
What we know from Duncan is the full extent of some of the changes. Duncan reports that:
In the event, however, the combined effect of the National Insurance Act, 1946 and the National Assistance Act, 1948 was to leave the rates of insurance benefits below those of national assistance in the majority of cases.


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