Abstract
Together with the maintenance of full employment, the provision of social security was the principal objective of both the Beveridge Report and the postwar Labour government. The concept of social security was novel to Britain in the 1940s — having been first formally acknowledged in the 1941 Atlantic Charter — and it means, in essence, the guarantee by government to all its citizens of an income sufficient to ensure an agreed minimum standard of living. In the 1940s the realisation of this guarantee depended largely on the expansion of various interwar insurance schemes; but, as argued in Section 2.1, the nature of these schemes was fundamentally changed by their being extended to the whole population, to cover all risks to an individual’s income and to provide — in theory at least — subsistence-level benefits.
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Notes and References
T. Cutler et al., Keynes, Beveridge and Beyond (1986) p. 16; Cmd 6404, para. 459. For the relative cost of the new scheme, see paras 275–99. In 1962, when Britain first applied to join the EEC, the Treasury calculated that British employers paid some £1000m p.a. less than their continental rivals, given the latter’s liability to fund payroll taxes (Treasury papers 2P10/90/155/01, yet to be released to the Public Record Office).
A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. 2 (1967) p. 242.
P. Baldwin, ‘Beveridge in the Longue Durée’ in J. Hills et al. (eds), Beveridge and Social Security (Oxford, 1994) p. 40.
K. G. Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy (1979) p. 68;
A. Deacon and J. Bradshaw, Reserved for the Poor (1983) p. 61.
R. Lowe, ‘The rediscovery of poverty and the creation of the Child Poverty Action Group’, Contemporary Record, 9 (1995) 602–37.
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P. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Harmondsworth, 1979) p. 31.
P. Townsend, ‘The meaning of poverty’, British Journal of Sociology, 13 (1962) 210–27;
G. C. Fiegehen et al., Poverty and Progress in Britain, 1953–73 (1977) p. 131;
J. Veit-Wilson, ‘The National Assistance Board and the “Rediscovery of Poverty”’ in H. Fawcett and R. Lowe (eds), British Postwar Welfare Policy: the road from 1945 (1998) Ch. 6. Rowntree himself had embraced the ‘minimum participatory level’ in The Human Needs of Labour (1937).
P. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Harmondsworth, 1979) Ch. 11.
B. Abel-Smith and P. Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest (1965) p. 17.
G. C. Fiegehen et al., Poverty and Progress in Britain, 1953–73 (1977) pp. 36–48. In some respects Rowntree (with his seeming obsession with the value of garden produce) and the assumption underlying the much-hated ‘household’ means test (that relations would support those in need) provided a more accurate picture of actual living conditions than statistics derived from government surveys.
A. B. Atkinson, Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security (Cambridge, 1970) p. 35. Another source of bias, identified by Abel-Smith and Townsend in 1965, is that reported income tends to be understated by 10 per cent (because irregular earnings, for example, are omitted), whilst expenditure is overstated by 5 per cent (because, for example, respondents want to impress).
B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State (1951);
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P. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Harmondsworth, 1979);
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A. B. Atkinson et al., ‘National Assistance and low incomes in 1950’, Social Policy and Administration, 15 (1981) 24. This article provides the best comparison of the surveys of Rowntree and Abel-Smith and Townsend and, in particular, argues that generalisation from York is dangerous since it did not have a full range of low-paid industries. On the ‘scientific’ basis of the sample, Rowntree and Lavers wrote: ‘We took a list of all the streets in York and a man who has lived in the city for more than half a century… marked on our list every street where working-class families live’ (Poverty and the Welfare State, p. 2).
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© 1999 Rodney Lowe
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Lowe, R. (1999). Social Security. In: The Welfare State in Britain since 1945. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27012-5_6
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