The people's insurance / explained by the chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Hon. David Lloyd George.

  • David Lloyd George
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The people's insurance / explained by the chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Hon. David Lloyd George. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    The Amount of Contribution I come to the amount of contribu- tion. The workman now pays to his friendly society 6d. or is. The usual contribution to a friendly society is something between 6d. and gd,, as far as I have been able to discover, and anything under that produces benefits which are benefits I do not think it would be worth our while to include in an Act of Parliament. The House will be interested to know what German workmen have to pay, because that was the first great scientific experiment in insurance on a national scale. It has been enormously successful. That is the testimony borne by all classes of Germans. I have taken some trouble to inquire, and the Ger- man Government have been exceed- ingly kind and helpful in placing information at our disposal. They have shown every disposition to be helpful throughout, and their testimony is that all classes of the community are very much benefited by it. The German Plan In Germany the payment is in pro- portion to wages, but the benefits are also in proportion to wages, so that the higher class of workman, who pays a very high contribution, gets a very substantial benefit. There are in Germany, I think, five classes of invalidity contributors, and for sickness every man pays according to his income. They divide • their in- surance into two separate branches of sickness and invalidity. There are two separate branches, but we propose to include them in one branch. In Ger- many a man who earns 30s. pays lofd. weekly for sickness and invalidity. There are not many of those. The man who is paid 24s. a week, which I think is about the average wage in this country, if you were to strike an average, which it is a difficult thing to do—the man who is paid 24s. a week pays gd. a week. For that gd. the benefits he gets will not be equal to the benefits we shall be able to give under our Bill twenty years hence. The 20s. a week man pays 7jd., the 18s. man 6fd., the 15s. man 5|d., the I2S. man 4fd., and the gs. man 3fd. In Germany, Benefits to Lower Classes very Small That is what the workman pays in Germany, and when you come down to these lower classes the benefits are so small that the workmen in Germany say they prefer to resort to parish relief as the benefits are much too inade- quate. For that reason we have decided in favour of one class, because if you have a scale which is proportionate it would be very difficult to give benefits to the lower class except by making special conditions which it would not be worth our while to make. It would certainly not give them a minimum allowance to keep their families from want. Government Plan—One Scale for a'll J Classes ;^ So we have decided to have one scale | for all classes, with a provision for th2 % lowest wages. Therefore, we ha^ e | decided to propose a deduction of 4d. ^ for men and 3d. for women. That >$ about a halfpenny per day and a penny on Saturday, or, as somebody told me, about the price of two pints of tlie cheapest beer per week, or the price of an ounce of tobacco. Now comes the difficulty of the man
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