National Insurance Act 1911
|
|
| Long title | An Act to provide for Insurance against Loss of Health and for the Prevention and Cure of Sickness and for Insurance against Unemployment, and for purposes incidental thereto. |
|---|---|
| Citation | 1911 c. 55 |
| Territorial extent | England and Wales; Scotland; Northern Ireland |
| Dates | |
| Royal assent | 16 December 1911 |
|
Status: Repealed
|
|
The National Insurance Act 1911 created a system of health insurance for industrial workers in Great Britain based on contributions from employers, the government, and the workers themselves. It was one of the foundations of the modern welfare state. It also provided unemployment insurance for designated cyclical industries. It formed part of the wider social welfare reforms of the Liberal Government of 1906–1915. David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the prime moving force behind its design, negotiations with doctors and other interest groups, and final passage.
Lloyd George followed the example of Germany, which under conservative Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had provided compulsory national insurance against sickness from 1884. After visiting Germany in 1908, Lloyd George said in his 1909 Budget Speech, that Britain should aim to be "putting ourselves in this field on a level with Germany; We should not emulate them only in armaments." His measure gave the British working classes the first contributory system of insurance against illness and unemployment. The Act only applied to wage earners—about seventy percent of the work force—their families and the unwaged were not covered.
After first praising the proposal, the Conservatives split and most voted against it. When returned to office they did not change it.
Some trade unions who operated their own insurance schemes and friendly societies who had their own schemes were at first opposed, but Lloyd George convinced most of them to support the proposal. The friendly societies and trade unions were given a major role in administering health insurance. Covered workers outside those agencies dealt with the local post office. The government picked up basic benefits that the unions and societies had promised, thus greatly helping their financial reserves.
The Act was psychologically important as it removed the need for unemployed workers to rely on the stigmatised social welfare provisions of the Poor Law. This hastened the end of the Poor Law as a social welfare provider, with the Poor Law unions being abolished in 1929, and the administration of poor relief being transferred to the counties and county boroughs.
Key figures in the implementation of the Act included Robert Laurie Morant, and especially economist William Braithwaite who drafted the details after inspecting the German system.
...
Wikipedia