| |
short also in its provision for cash benefit for maternity and funerals
and through the defects of its system for workmen's compensation.
In all other fields British provision for security, in adequacy of
amount and in comprehensiveness, will stand comparison with that of
any other country; few countries will stand comparison with Britain.
Second, social insurance and the allied services, as they exist today,
are conducted by a complex of disconnected administrative organs,
proceeding on different principles, doing invaluable service but at
a cost in money and trouble and anomalous treatment of identical problems
for which there is no justification. In a system of social security
better on the whole than can be found in almost any other country
there are serious deficiencies which call for remedy. |
| 4. |
Thus limitation of compulsory insurance to persons under
contract of service and below a certain remuneration if engaged on
non-manual work is a serious gap. Many persons working on their own
account are poorer and more in need of State insurance than employees;
the remuneration limit for non-manual employees is arbitrary and takes
no account of family responsibility. There is, again, no real difference
between the income needs of persons who are sick and those who are
unemployed, but they get different rates of benefit involving different
contribution conditions and with meaningless distinctions between
persons of different ages. An adult insured man with a wife and two
children receives 38/- per week should he become unemployed; if after
some weeks of unemployment he becomes sick and not available for work,
his insurance income falls to 18/-. On the other hand a youth of 17
obtains 9/- when he is unemployed, but should he become sick his insurance
income rises to 12/- per week. There are, to take another example,
three different means tests for non-contributory pensions, for supplementary
pensions and for public assistance, with a fourth test - for unemployment
assistance - differing from that for supplementary pensions in some
particulars. |
| 5. |
Many other such examples could be given; they are the natural result
of the way in which social security has grown in Britain. It is not
open to question that, by closer co-ordination, the existing social
services could be made at once more beneficial and more intelligible
to those whom they serve and more economical in their administration. |
THREE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF RECOMMENDATIONS
|
| 6. |
In proceeding from this first comprehensive survey of
social insurance to the next task - of making recommendations - three
guiding principles may be laid down at the outset. |
| 7. |
The first principle is that any proposals for the future, while
they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should
not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established
in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing
landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in
a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world's history is a
time for revolutions, not for patching. |
| 8. |
The second principle is that organisation of social insurance should
be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress.
Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is
an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road
of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others
are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. |
| 9. |
The third principle is that social security must be achieved by
co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should
offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising
security should |
7
|
| |
not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in
establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement
for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that
minimum for himself and his family. |
| 10. |
The Plan for Social Security set out in this Report is built upon
these principles. It uses experience but is not tied by experience.
It is put forward as a limited contribution to a wider social policy,
though as something that could be achieved now without waiting for
the whole of that policy. It is, first and foremost, a plan of insurance
- of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence
level, as of right and without means test, so that individuals may
build freely upon it. |
THE WAY TO FREEDOM FROM WANT
|
| 11. |
The work of the Inter-departmental Committee began with a review
of existing schemes of social insurance and allied services. The Plan
for Social Security, with which that work ends, starts from a diagnosis
of want - of the circumstances in which, in the years just preceding
the present war, families and individuals in Britain might lack the
means of healthy subsistence. During those years impartial scientific
authorities made social surveys of the conditions of life in a number
of principal towns in Britain, including London, Liverpool, Sheffield,
Plymouth, Southampton, York and Bristol. They determined the proportions
of the people in each town whose means were below the standard assumed
to be necessary for subsistence, and they analysed the extent and
causes of that deficiency. From each of these social surveys the same
broad result emerges. Of all the want shown by the surveys, from three-quarters
to five-sixths, according to the precise standard chosen for want,
was due to interruption or loss of earning power. Practically the
whole of the remaining one-quarter to one-sixth was due to failure
to relate income during earning to the size of the family. These surveys
were made before the introduction of supplementary pensions had reduced
amount of poverty amongst old persons. But this does not affect the
main conclusion to be drawn from these surveys: abolition of want
requires a double re-distribution of income, through social insurance
and by family needs. |
| 12. |
Abolition of want requires, first, improvement of State insurance,
that is to say provision against interruption and loss of earning
power. All the principal causes of interruption or loss of earnings
are now the subject of schemes of social insurance. If, in spite of
these schemes, so many persons unemployed or sick or old or widowed
are found to be without adequate income for subsistence according
to the standards adopted in the social surveys, this means that the
benefits amount to less than subsistence by those standards or do
not last as long as the need, and that the assistance which supplements
insurance is either insufficient in amount or available only on terms
which make men unwilling to have recourse to it. None of the insurance
benefits provided before the war were in fact designed with reference
to the standards of the social surveys. Though unemployment benefit
was not altogether out of relation to those standards, sickness and
disablement benefit, old age pensions and widows' pensions were far
below them, while workmen's compensation was below subsistence level
for anyone who had family responsibilities or whose earning in work
were less than twice the amount needed for subsistence. To prevent
interruption or destruction of earning power from leading to want,
it is necessary to improve the present schemes of social insurance
in three directions: by extension of scope to cover persons now excluded,
by extension of purposes to cover risks now excluded, and by raising
the rates of benefit. |
| 13. |
Abolition of want requires, second, adjustment of incomes, in periods
of earning as well as in interruption of earning, to family needs,
that is to say, |
|