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This Would Have Cost The Government Considerably More Than Adjustment To The ...

This would have cost the government considerably more than adjustment to the complicated system of allowances which, in any case, ensured that at least the income of wives of serving men did not appear to be too far below those of civilian workers. The Government had behaved with regard to serviceman's pay exactly as the trade unions predicted employers would behave if they financed schemes of family allowances for their workers: basic wage levels would be decreased.(9)
As I mentioned at the outset, the issue of the extent and reasons for the Attlee Governments' departure from the Beveridge Report when creating the welfare state is one for a full and hearty debate. It would be possible to fill many more pages than I have available here with debate and counter debate upon this issue. I will therefore attempt to summarize some important points within the discussion. According to Albert Weale, Beveridge should be dissociated from the developments in social policy, which Weale believes moved extensively away from his principles.
It is quite simply that no post-war Government has fully implemented some of his most characteristic social security proposals. National insurance benefits have never been paid at the subsistence level which Beveridge regarded as the absolute precondition for his scheme to work and individuals have had to have their benefits topped up by the National Assistance and Supplementary Benefits schemes. The explanation of this is that no one has devised an adequate solution to the problem the original Berveridge committee wrestled with in the spring of 1943, namely how to cope with regional variations in rent and other housing costs. Consequently current income-maintenance programmes have many built in features to which Beveridge was opposed. In particular the dependence of the National Insurance scheme on the non-contributory Supplementary Benefits system has meant that there is now a considerable amount of administrative discretion involved in decisions on entitlement to benefit.(10)
There can be little doubt that the issue of housing costs was one which was built into the system devised by Beveridge. It is possible that Beveridge envisaged the system being resolved by a complete takeover of housing needs by local authorities. Such an outcome would have led to more unified housing prices, and the possibility of the scheme working. This is of course complete hypotheses but I find it difficult to believe that Beveridge would have left such an anomaly within his report without having an idea of how the problem could be solved. If this is the case or not, there can be no doubt that this problem was responsible for many of the implementation failures which followed. It is a key factor in the system being set up with a far greater recourse to the Assistance Board, and Means Testing than Beveridge ever envisaged.

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