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Professor Noel Whiteside talks about the history of Britain's welfare system on Radio 4's Analysis programme

The COVID pandemic has exposed middle-class self-employed people who have lost work to the very low rates of benefit available on Universal Credit in the UK (even including the supplement recently added by the Treasury). Envious eyes have looked across the Channel to Germany where support for the unemployed is so much more generous.

In a recent edition of Radio 4’s Analysis programme, Professor Noel Whiteside described the historical origins of the very different systems of social insurance found in both countries, pointing up how William Beveridge’s scheme, described in his 1942 Report to form the foundation stone of Britain’s post-war social security, never managed to operate as its author intended. Not designed to reflect previous earnings, flat-rate subsistence-level benefits were swiftly corroded by post-war inflation, forcing those out of work with no other resources to resort to means-tested national assistance, even before Mrs Thatcher came to power (and reduced income replacement rates considerably). The German system, of course, requires both employers and employees to pay a much higher proportion of their salary into five social insurance schemes. In the UK, this question of contributory costs has long dogged debates when considering a similar strategy. As a result, social insurance as such has rarely operated in Britain, where means-tests and conditionality have grown constantly to dominate the provision of state support to the socially dependent.

Fri 13 Nov 2020, 18:15 | Tags: welfare, Covid-19