The Beveridge ╥Plan for Social Security╙ will stir up more controversy ╤ and raise more hopes ╤ than any project for social change since Mr. Lloyd George╒s National Health Insurance Bill of 1911. The controversy is inevitable; ╥vested interests,╙ private and bureaucratic, are challenged in a hundred ways. But while many will find room to criticise, it cannot be too urgently pleaded that judgment should not be hasty. Before any of us starts to condemn or to campaign let him be sure he has studied the report as a whole and in its full text. Let him be sure that he has tried to weigh his sectional interest or prejudice against the plan╒s large purpose. It would be well to remember how time has vindicated Mr. Lloyd George and how misguided the agitations against old-age pensions and health insurance now appear. And those who resist change should also reflect that this is a very different England from that of thirty years ago. It is an England that cannot be frightened by the bogy of State action; it has seen too many ways of life altered to be sensitive to sectional claims if it can be convinced that they stand in the way of the general good. The Beveridge plan is a big and fine thing. It is not only the welding into an administrative unity of our splendid but untidy and wasteful social services, but the charting of a great piece of national reconstruction. If it is carried through by the Government, as in all its essentials it surely must be, it will be the redemption, on a large section of the home front, of the promises of the Atlantic Charter. It will go far towards securing for the British people ╥freedom from want╙ and, completed by a really national health service and by determined attempts to prevent cyclical mass unemployment, it will greatly strengthen our democracy by raising the happiness and wellbeing of ╥the common man.╙
No one can study the details of the plan ╤imperfectly presented in the limited space any daily newspaper can devote to it to-day ╤ without gratitude to its author and admiration of his broad grasp and his extraordinary capacity for administrative simplification. One has only to compare it with the numerous sets of proposals that came before the Beveridge Committee (now issued in a separate volume) to appreciate these exceptional qualities. Everyone has talked for years about unifying the social services. Here is the machinery for it carried far beyond previous conceptions into an all-embracing national plan from which no citizen is excluded and which creates for the first time a national minimum. It is not a high level ╤ though vastly better than what is provided at present ╤ but it does bear relation to what the social surveys and the studies of nutrition have taught us about the subsistence minimum. The plan is based, as Sir William Beveridge says, on a diagnosis of want. It provides, therefore, not only against all the various forms of interruption and loss of earning power ╤ unemployment, sickness and accident, old age, widowhood ╤ but it adjusts incomes in periods of earning to family needs. Without children╒s allowances acute want would still exist among the low-paid workers with large families, and ╥in all such cases income will be greater during unemployment or other interruptions of work than during work.╙ The arguments for children╒s allowances have nowhere been better stated and the reform has been most ingeniously woven into the social fabric. The omission of payment for the first child (in earning families) makes it financially manageable. The same ingenuity is shown in the treatment of old-age pensions by making pensions conditional on retirement while offering inducement for this to be postponed. There are no more important provisions in the report than these two, which for the first time take account of the two dominating facts about our national future ╤ the decline in the child population and the growing numbers of the elderly.
The attractive features of the plan are innumerable ╤ the extension to the whole population, which carries forward our war ideas of equality and community; the clearing up of sectional anomalies; the abolition of the means test; the emphasis on training and rehabilitation; the special benefits for married women; the administrative concentration; and, above all, the provision of a genuinely national health service covering medical treatment for all. There may be argument against putting so much of the cost on the contributions of employers and workers, but Sir William Beveridge makes out a good case for extending the contributory principle; it has certainly advantages of political expediency. Three proposals touch outside ╥vested interests,╙ those concerning the approved societies, industrial assurance, and workmen╒s compensation. The arguments of the report are extremely weighty. It needs a surgical operation to fit the present health insurance and workmen╒s compensation systems into a national scheme of social security. We must do the job thoroughly and be the more determined since present methods are clearly wasteful, costly, and inequitable to the people at large. Sir William Beveridge╒s detailed examination of industrial assurance (Appendix D) is highly disturbing, and most people who study it carefully will find it hard to resist its conclusion that the country would be better served by a public instead of a private service in this field. The report is now open for discussion and action. It will rouse keen hopes and expectations not only among the British people here and in the forces but among our allies. The Government and Parliament have an opportunity which they will neglect at their peril and ours. For if we do not get something like the ╥Plan for Social Security╙ into being before the war is over the political consequences will be serious. Instead of victory we shall have suffered defeat.
