The British National Insurance Act of 1911 and the Commercial Insurance Lobby

Abstract

By any measure, the National Insurance Act of 1911 ranks among the major legislative achievements of the Liberal administration that held office in Great Britain before World War I. One section of the act founded the world's first national system of compulsory unemployment insurance. Another section brought government-sponsored health insurance to five sixths of the families of the nation and established the precedent of state concern for the physical welfare of the individual citizen, of which the National Health Service Act of 1946 would be only an extension. By requiring beneficiary contributions toward welfare programs, the act settled the financial pattern for most of Britain's present social legislation. In a less crowded period, the National Insurance Act would rank as an imposing parliamentary monument, comparable, for instance, to the Education Act of 1902. Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, it has been lost from sight. The measure is not mentioned in the standard biography either of Asquith or of Balfour. It earns one sentence in G. M. Trevelyan's History of England in the Nineteenth Century, where through successive editions and revisions it is called “the National Health Insurance Act of 1912.” R. C. K. Ensor's England, 1870-1914 gives it a couple of paragraphs.This study is an examination of an important, perhaps crucial, aspect of the evolution of the health insurance section of the National Insurance Act that has remained unnoticed for half a century: the lobby activity of the British commercial insurance industry by which the companies modified health insurance proposals for their own benefit.