Indust Injuries Insur Ils 152 by A. F. Young

Author:A. F. Young [Young, A. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780415176774
Google: 6dKAAAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13709054
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1998-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Beveridge Proposals

When Beveridge took over from the Royal Commission the sole responsibility for reporting on workmen's compensation, he was also required to consider the other forms of social insurance that had been built up since 1911. His task, therefore, was less circumscribed than his predecessors', and he was able to see the accident scheme against the backcloth of the social insurances in general. Each had been developed piece-meal, with the result that an inconvenient and, in many ways, unjust hotch-potch had resulted. Beveridge conceived it his duty to weave the existing schemes together to make a viable whole, and especially to fill the main gaps in the schemes, and so to modify the principles that a new pattern, more in line with the trend of thought of the second half of the twentieth century, could be developed. He declared that his scheme was not a revolution, but simply a modification of existing schemes. Yet his primary postulates of a national health service and family allowances, both financed out of state funds (though the insurance fund was to make annual payments to the national health service), and his proposals for a national system of social insurance have accomplished such a transformation in the British social services, as to be deemed a ‘revolution’ by those who have experienced conditions both ‘before and after’ Beveridge.

It might be thought that anyone so anxious to ‘pool risks’, to let ‘all men stand together’, to ‘equate benefit with need’ as Beveridge was, would have recommended the abolition of a separate scheme for industrial injuries as a first step towards equity. But he did not. Instead, he faced the problem of the separation of risks with all its anomalies of treating equal needs differently, and its administrative and legal difficulties of defining just what injuries were to be treated as ‘arising out of and in the course of employment’, by using three arguments:1

(a) Many industries vital to the community were also dangerous. If men were to enter them, and it was essential that they should, they should be assured of special provision if accident or disease overtook them. Further, the claim to compensation ought to be on the basis of past earning, and not on a subsistence minimum as he was to propose for other social security benefits. The argument of special provision, Beveridge considered, was a very strong one.

(b) A man being injured at work meant he was injured ‘under orders’, which made the situation unlike other accidents and diseases.

(c) In equity an employer should not be liable for injury to his work people unless he was blameworthy, in which case an action in common law would take care of him. But to make him legally liable for almost every work-accident was wrong. On the other hand, the only way to rectify the employer's position and yet to provide benefit for an employee if an accident or industrial disease overtook him, whether the employee were negligent or not, was to provide a new scheme.

To Beveridge these

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