William Beveridge

William Beveridge was born in Bengal, India, in 1879, where his father was a judge in the Indian Civil Service. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, trained as a lawyer and turned to social questions while working at Toynbee Hall in London. Before the First World War he advised the Liberal government, organising the national system of labour exchanges and the first National Insurance scheme. He was Director of the London School of Economics from 1919 to 1937 and then Master of University College, Oxford. In 1941 he was appointed to lead a committee on the reconstruction of social services, and his report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, was published in December 1942. It sold more than 650,000 copies. He was elected Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1944, lost the seat in 1945, and entered the House of Lords in 1946. The Attlee government built much of its welfare state on his proposals.

Beveridge is widely seen as a founder of the British welfare state, and a poll at the time found 86 per cent of the public in favour of his proposals. Admirers across parties credit him with replacing a patchwork of means-tested relief with social security as a right. Critics on the right argued that the cost was unaffordable, while later critics noted that his scheme assumed male breadwinners and limited married women's access to benefits. He was also a member of the Eugenics Society, and in 1909 proposed that men who could not work should lose their citizen rights, views that historians treat as a serious blemish, although scholars disagree about their influence on the 1942 report.