Social insurance.

Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Social insurance. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Insurance scheme provides dependant’s benefit. (The allowance will be payable only in respect of one dependant at a time.) 80. Thus, a man or woman will be able to count as a dependant an invalid father or widowed mother, or adult sister or daughter (subject to conditions about residence, maintenance, etc.), or a housekeeper, whether resident or non-resident, who looks after his or her dependent children. In addition, a woman whose husband is an invalid and dependent on her will be able to count him as a dependant. But a man who has a woman living with him as his wife, or has living with him a person not related to him who keeps house for him, will not be able to count her as a dependant unless he has dependent children and she looks after them. The rate of the allowance will be 16s. except when the contributor is drawing invalidity benefit. Then it will be 15s. . 81. If there were a registration of dependants, as the Report suggests, it is doubtful whether, even if an accurate and complete registration at the start of the scheme were achieved, it would be possible to keep the register up to date. Persons in work might well fail to notify subsequent changes, i.e. when persons originally registered as dependants ceased to be dependent or when persons not previously registered later became dependants. So, when claims to benefit were made, the register could not be taken as decisive one way or the other, and there would be scarcely any advantage in compiling it. X—RETIREMENT PENSIONS The Problem 82. The prevention of want in old age is an objective of policy by which the Government set great store. But it involves a problem with certain special features, arising out of the fall in the birth-rate and the consequent rise in the proportion of elderly people in the community. The Government Actuary has estimated that in the twenty years from 1945 to 1905 the population of pensioners over working age will grow from about 3,400,000 to 5,300,000, an increase of about 1,900,000, whereas the number of contributors will be prac- tically stationary at about 21,co0,000. In the next ten years, from 1965 to 1975, there will be a further increase of about 800,000 in the pensioner popula- tion, while the contributing population will fall by over 1,000,000. Rather less than one half of the increase in the number of pensioners in the first twenty years is due to the gradual inclusion of the new classes who have to serve a qualifying period. The result of these changes is that, whereas in 1945 it is estimated that there will be 16 pensioners to every 100 contributors, there will, by 1975, be about 31 pensioners to every 100 contributors. 83. This is the position as estimated on the assumption that the fertility and death rates of the immediate pre-war years will continue after the war. A substantial improvement in longevity would materially add to the number of pensioners, thus increasing still further the proportion of pensioners to con- tributors. Any rise which might occur in the fertility rate would at once add to the cost of children’s benefits, but it would enlarge the working population only after an interval, and could no‘ make any appreciable difference to the ratio of pensioners to contributors in the years under review. Rate of Pension 84. The proposal in the Report was that the rate of pension to be payable twenty years from the start of the scheme would be fixed now, at 4os. (joint) and 24s. (single), and that contributions should be payable from the start on the basis of this ultimate rate. The rate of pension was, however, to start at 25s. (joint) and 14s. (single) and, for persons insured under the existing
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