William Beveridge

William Beveridge (1879 to 1963) was a British economist and social reformer whose 1942 government report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, proposed a comprehensive system of social security funded from general taxation and available to every citizen regardless of contribution record, covering what he called the five giant evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The report became the blueprint for Britain's postwar welfare state and National Health Service under the Labour government elected in 1945.