ABSTRACT
The creation of a Ministry of Labour was one of Lloyd George’s first acts on becoming Prime Minister in December 1916. It was essentially a political gesture, designed to win the parliamentary support of the Labour Party; but it also had some administrative logic. Before 1916 ministries of labour had been established in many industrial countries and since the 1890s there had been intermittent demands for one in Britain. In particular, the expansion of social administration after 1909 had led to calls for the separation of the commercial and labour responsibilities of the Board of Trade; and during the war itself there had been demands for the better co-ordination of labour policy under a single department which – unlike the Ministry of Munitions – had the confidence of organised labour. All these arguments Lloyd George deployed, with his usual guile, to win the support of Labour Party leaders at their crucial meeting on 7 December. He argued:
Up to the present we have had only one Labour head of a Department. I won’t suggest that there should be two … but I suggest an absolutely new Department – a Ministry of Labour … which could incorporate the Labour section of the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Munitions under one head. That Department would certainly be one of the most important Departments in the Government because, however important a Labour Ministry would be in time of peace – and it would essentially be a Department whose decisions would very naturally affect the lives of millions of people in this country – in times of war it is almost doubly important … I propose that that Department should have at its head a Labour representative. 1
