The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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periods of unemployment and disability, during which expenditure on renewals can be postponed; more will be needed in prolonged interruption of earnings. On the other hand, there should be room for re-adjustment in such matters as rent or retrenchment in the margin [the margin referred to above which allowed for inefficient or inessential spending]. On the whole, it seems fair to balance these considerations against one another and make no change in the benefit as between short and long interruption of earnings during working years.10
Beveridge, to be fair, stated quite openly that he was designing his system to cope with ‘normal cases’, a phrase he repeatedly used. He was bringing Churchill’s ‘magic of averages’ to the average person. Insurance could not in fact cope with everything, and beneath the insurance plan there had still to be a safety net — National Assistance, or what later became income support. That would still be needed ‘to meet abnormal [my italics] subsistence needs’.11 Under Beveridge’s assumption of full employment, long-term joblessness would be abnormal.
Then there was rent, an issue which resolutely refused to be normal. In 1947 owner-occupiers made up just 26 per cent of households. A mere 13 per cent of households were council tenants, the remainder renting privately in one form or another.12 Then as now there were wide variations in rent for the same quality and size of housing – more than a tenfold difference. Beveridge struggled with whether to pay an average allowance for rent. The effect of that would be to leave those in more costly homes below subsistence level once they had paid it, and those in cheaper homes than the average better off financially. The alternative was to pay rent in full for pensioners and the insured unemployed as already happened for those on means-tested national assistance. That, however, raised problems of incentives, about which Beveridge was particularly hard-nosed when it came to the elderly. If rent was met in full for pensioners, ‘it will appear indefensible that those who just before retiring have been able to secure good accommodation at a relatively high rent should thereby retain this advantage for the rest of their lives, in kind if not in cash, as compared with those who have been less fortunate or less foreseeing. On the other hand, if those who are already drawing pension on the basis of one rent are free to move to more expensive accommodation and have their pension increased accordingly, pensions will come to look like subsidies to landlords.’ Had Mrs Thatcher’s government in the 1980s taken a similarly tough view, it would not have designed the poll tax specifically to take account of little old Tory ladies rattling around on their own in large houses from which their children had fled; and history might have been different.
Rent was one of three ‘special problems’ Beveridge identified, and after many hours of work and nine pages of discussion in the report, he recognised that he had failed to solve it – that it involved bigger questions such as housing policy and the distribution of industry. Beveridge went for a flat rate allowance within unemployment benefit,13 admitting he was having ‘to make the best of a difficult situation’. The Labour Government in 1948 dropped that idea and instead met actual housing costs, subject to a means-test. How housing costs should be handled was to remain a permanent thorn in the flesh of the welfare state.
Women also posed problems, given the scheme Beveridge had devised. Indeed in his original ‘heads of a scheme’ he acknowledged: ‘The treatment of married women is one of the most troublesome problems in social security.’14 Feminist writers (and not only feminist writers) have bitterly attacked Beveridge for his views and recommendations. There is some justice in that, but only some. The assaults tend to ignore that Beveridge was of his time and that if he failed to foresee radical changes to come, then that foresight was also denied to many others. In fact his recommendations did much to improve women’s position. Before his report single women enjoyed virtually the same right as men to unemployment benefits if in work, but only means-tested assistance if they had never worked or had not paid enough contributions. On marriage, women became ‘adult dependants’ on their husbands and, apart from the maternity grant, they had no rights under the health insurance scheme. ‘None of these attitudes is defensible,’ Beveridge declared.15
By the time he was writing, women were pouring into the workforce: an extra 1.8 million were recruited into industry alone between 1939 and 1943, in addition to those who joined the armed forces and took other work. In 1940, the qualifying age for their pension had been dropped to 60, to encourage them to undertake war work. It was the start of a dramatic change in women’s role and status. But Beveridge shared the widespread assumption that after the war, as after the First World War, women would simply go home to be housewives. The 1931 Census (the most up-to-date figures Beveridge had available) showed that more than seven out of eight married women did not work. As he told the committee, ‘provision for married women should be framed with reference to the seven rather than the one’;16 so he assumed in the report that ‘during marriage most women will not be gainfully employed’.
Beveridge also shared another common concern. Britain was seen to have ‘a population problem’ – not as in the 1970s of potentially too many people, but of potentially too few. During the 1930s the birth-rate had fallen. In fact by 1942 it was rising, a product of a record number of marriages on the eve of war and a sharp rise in illegitimacy,17 but Beveridge was not to know that. ‘In the next thirty years,’ he said in the report, ‘housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race,’18 adding later: ‘with its present rate of reproduction, the British race cannot continue; means of reversing the recent course of the birth rate must be found.’19 He not only expected married women to be housewives, he also wanted incentives for marriage and child-bearing. He therefore recommended a marriage grant (that was never implemented), maternity grant, maternity benefit for thirteen weeks for those in work, family allowances and widow’s benefits; and in addition women and children were to fall within the ambit of the new, free, national health service. The package as a whole ‘puts a premium on marriage, in place of penalising it’, he declared.20
In addition to the cash that was to be paid as family allowances to ensure ‘subsistence’ both in and out of work, Beveridge also wanted to keep tax allowances for children. In that decision lay the seeds of the great Child Benefit battle. He in part wanted them retained because he held mildly eugenidst views. Although he did not say so in the report, he believed the tax allowance, which is worth more to the better off, would encourage the middle and professional classes – ‘the more successful’ in society, as he put it – to have more children.21 (Similar reflections about the desirability of who should do the breeding were to sink Sir Keith Joseph’s chances of leading the Tory party thirty-three years later.) He thus clothed his recommendations for women in pro-marital and pro-women rhetoric. Marriage gave women a ‘new economic status’ and they should thus begin ‘a new life in relation to social insurance’.22 Recognition that housewives performed ‘necessary service not for pay’ even led Beveridge, after much agonising about whether it would encourage family break-up, to recommend a rather unsatisfactory separation benefit to be paid when marriages broke down – unless, of course, the woman was the guilty party. This, too, was never implemented.
Beveridge did not formally oppose married women working. Indeed, he proposed benefits for those who did through a special lower rate of national insurance contribution which they had the choice of paying – although it produced lower unemployment and disability benefits as it was assumed that the husband would already be providing a home to live in. But work by married women was likely to be ‘intermittent’, Beveridge believed, and he did not see the income from it as a crucial part of the household’s financial survival. All this stemmed from his view that benefits should provide only a basic income and that man and wife were ‘a team’. Thus the woman’s pension, and her entitlement to benefit during her husband’s unemployment and disability, came from her share in that partnership. This even stretched to the old age pension being notionally cast as a pension for a couple that was reduced for single people, rather than being seen as a single person’s pension to which extra was added for a dependant. Beveridge disliked the concept of wives as dependants, and he argued that his proposals ended that. The description ‘adult dependant’, he said, should be reserved ‘for one who is dependent on an insured person but is not the wife of that person’.23
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