SOCIAL WORK

Social Work



Acknowledgement

I would take this opening to express gratitude my study supervisor, family and friends for their support and guidance without which this research would not have been possible.

Table of Content

Social Work

Introduction

The impetus for what was to become the Beveridge Report came from the TUC, who had for some time been pressing the Government for a comprehensive review of social insurance. In February 1941 they sent a deputation to the Minister of Health to draw attention to the existing anomalies in health insurance and the response was to set up a committee of civil servants to consider the problems. In June the Minister for Reconstruction, Arthur Greenwood, invited Sir William Beveridge to chair the committee and the Beveridge Report was under way. Beveridge was an obvious choice. He was eminently suited to the task by virtue of his long association with the world of national insurance and the problems of unemployment, and because he combined the skills of the social investigator with those of the practical administrator. After Charterhouse and Oxford, Beveridge gave up the prospect of a career at the bar and for two years took on the unlikely post of subwarden of Toynbee Hall, a university Settlement in Whitechapel, in 1903. Here he encountered the realities of the effects of unemployment in London's East End and became actively involved in both investigating the problems and administering the schemes to deal with them. As a result of his experiences there he was to write in 1909 Unemployment, A Problem of Industry, an influential book which helped to create the system of labour exchanges as a means of combating unemployment. He then spent three years as a leader-writer on social issues at the Morning Post, where he continued to involve himself in matters to do with social security. From here he moved directly into a civil service post in the Board of Trade in 1908 to implement his ideas about labour exchanges and to assist in framing legislation for unemployment insurance which reached the statue book in 1911. During the First World War he continued to work in various departments and chaired a committee on unemployment insurance. Beveridge had made a favourable impression on the Webbs when they were working on the review of the Poor Laws which culminated in the Minority Report of 1909. When they needed a full-time Director for their brainchild, the London School of Economics, they offered the job to him. In 1919 he took up his post there where he stayed until 1937. During that time he continued to write on social security issues and for ten years from 1934 he chaired the Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee, which strengthened his contacts in the TUC, which were to be invaluable when he came to write his Report, and kept himinvolved in insurance matters. He left the LSE for the mastership of University College, Oxford where he was when called upon to chair the committee on social insurance and allied ...