Beveridge Report

The Beveridge Report recommended a system whereby:

All people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who are sick, unemployed, retired or widowed.

There were existing systems of social insurance and poor relief (unemployment relief, old age pensions, and so forth), but as Beveridge himself can be heard saying in the film below (2min 17sec):

My plan for social security in Britain is to expand and combine our existing separate schemes of social insurance into one comprehensive scheme, which will secure to every citizen, on condition of working and contributing while he can work, an income sufficient for the subsistence of himself and his family when for any reason he cannot work, through sickness, accident, unemployment or old age.