Beveridge Scheme

The Beveridge Scheme refers to the comprehensive system of welfare provision outlined by William Beveridge (1879–1963) in his 1942 Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. This was an important component of the wartime government’s long-term planning for when peace returned and political attention turned toward economic and social reconstruction. Implicit was recognition, at the highest levels of government, that poverty and other forms of socioeconomic deprivation or disadvantages would need to be tackled once World War II was over. This would provide the ideal opportunity to build a new Britain, one in which the state would play a much more active and regulatory role than before; there should be no return [Page 120]to the mass unemployment and destitution that had blighted the 1930s, following ...