Lord Beveridge Will Visit Otago

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 441, 5 December 1947, Page 33

Lord Beveridge Will Visit Otago

the Social Security plan for Great Britain, is to visit Dunedin next year as the first de Carle lecturer at Otago University. New Zealanders will then have an opportunity of seeing and hearing one of the foremost economists of the day, a scholar, writer and politician who was last year raised to the peerage for his contribution to the social welfare of the people of Britain. Apart from his distinguished academic career as director of the London School of Economics (from 1919 to 1937) and Master of University College, Oxford, Lord Beveridge has been a_ prolific writer on a variety of subjects and was for a period during the war Liberal Member for Berwick-on-Tweed in the House of Commons. ORD BEVERIDGE, author of When his first Social Insurance plan appeared in 1942, one writer described Lord Beveridge as "a white-thatched, Bengal-born Scotsman with whimsical grey eyes, a scythe-like nose and cheeks like Cox’s Pippins, who in a massive 290,000-word document drearily titled Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, has sounded the bugle-call of social revolution in a scheme aimed at

the abolition of hunger, disappearance of poverty, food for all, work for all, leisure for all, and equal opportunity for all." As a young man at Oxford he was trained as an astronomer, afid took three Firsts and a degree in law. After a period as leader writer for the Morning Post he joined the Civil Service, devised the Employment Exchange system, and blue-printed the food rationing machinery used in World War I. Other important posts that he has held since then are president of the Royal Economic. Society from 1940, president of the Royal Statistical Society, senator of London University, member of the Royal Commission on coal (1925), chairman of the Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee (1934 to 1944), and chairman of the _ Interdepartmental Committee on _ Social Insurance and Allied Services (1941-42). The Beveridge Plan The main outlines of his Social Security scheme (known as the Beveridge Plan), much of which had already been legislation in New Zealand for gome time, were based on three major assumptions: (1) Allowances for children to the age of 15; (2) comprehensive

health and rehabilitation services for the prevention and cure of disease, and the restoration of capacity for work; (3) avoidance of mass unemployment. His report proposed 23 major reforms, chief of which were the formation of a Ministry of Social Security, changes in the Workmen’s Compensation system, and extension of Disability and Pensions Insurance. A noteworthy point was the proposed recognition of the social status of housewives, who were recommended for special benefits such as a Marriage Grant and a Maternity Grant. The Beveridge Plan differed from the New Zealand scheme in that it proposed a flat rate of contribution, but with the security fund supplemented by employers’ contributions and a grant from the Exchequer. Rates of benefit also were to be flat for all classes, thus entirely eliminating the means test in use in New Zealand. At a by-election in 1944 Lord Beveridge was elected to Parliament, but was defeated at the general election the next year. Late in 1944 appeared his work Full Employment in a Free Society, which proposed "the socialisation of demand" rather than the Labour policy of socialising production.