William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist, eugenicist and Liberal politician who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in the 1944 Berwick-upon-Tweed by-election as a Liberal MP. Following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, India (now in Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919, he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933, he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council, which helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Cycles and periodicity research
While Director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge conducted a large-scale statistical study of European wheat prices and rainfall, published as "Weather and Harvest Cycles" (1921) in The Economic Journal and, in fuller form, as "Wheat Prices and Rainfall in Western Europe" (1922) in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Drawing on wheat-price records from nearly fifty locations across six European regions spanning the years 1500 to 1869, Beveridge applied periodogram (harmonic) analysis in an effort to identify recurring cycles in agricultural prices and to test their relationship to rainfall. The resulting "Beveridge Wheat Price Index" identified numerous candidate cycles, most prominently periodicities of roughly 5, 9.75, and 35 years, and has remained a standard reference dataset in time-series statistics.
Contemporary and later statisticians, including Gilbert Walker, raised methodological concerns about the reliability of some of the periodicities Beveridge identified, and a 1971 re-analysis in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society described the original application of periodogram analysis to the wheat-price series as, in the view of some later statisticians, methodologically unreliable, though later work has confirmed a persistent cycle of roughly 13 years in the raw data. Despite this, the work was influential outside economics: the Foundation for the Study of Cycles repeatedly cited Beveridge's wheat-price cycles alongside independently derived weather cycles from meteorologist David Brunt as evidence of cross-domain periodicity, finding apparent agreement near 3½, 5, 8, 9½, and 35 years between the two datasets.
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940, and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.