For other people named William Beveridge, see William Beveridge (disambiguation)The Lord BeveridgeLord Beveridge in 1943Born5 March 1879Bengal, Bangladesh, British India (now Bangladesh) Died16 March 1963 (aged 84)Oxford, E NationalityBritish EducationCharterhouse School andBalliol College, O OccupationEconomist, Social Scientistand academic Known forWork towards founding thewelfare state in the United K Political partyLiberal Party Spouse(s)Jessy Janet Philip OBE ( 1959) William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge KCB (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist, noted progressiveand social He is 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 elected in He was considered an authority on unemployment insurance from early in his career, served under Winston Churchill on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of F He was Director of theLondon School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, O Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry(1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence(1953), and A Defence of Free Learning (1959)Contents [hide] 1Early life and education2Life and career3Wartime 1Report on social insurance4Later career5Eugenics6Personal life7Works8See also9Resources10References11External linksEarly life and education[edit]Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March His mother was a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community who, along with another Unitarian, Elisabeth Malleson, had founded the Working Women's College in London's Queen Square in She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for native Indian [1]William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a First in He later studied LBeveridge at Balliol College in 1898Life and career[edit]After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in L There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb toWinston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of T Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of FIn 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political S Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social 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 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 During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance C This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, OWartime work[edit]Beveridge in the Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his M 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 Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him [2]Report on social insurance[edit]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 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 Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only [3]The Report to the Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or 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 I 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 H[4]Beveridge's arguments were widely He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions 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 Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed how this goal might be [5] Alternative measures for achieving it included Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of Later career[edit]Beveridge talking to an American fighter pilot hospitalised atUniversity College, Oxford during the Second World WarLater in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeedGeorge Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 The following year the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare S Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in the 1945 general Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge R This included the establishment of aNational Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for 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 In 1946 Beveridge was raised to the peerage as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland,[6] and eventually became leader of the Liberals in the House of L He was the author of Power and Influence (1953)He was the President of the charity Attend[7] (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952-Eugenics[edit]I