ABSTRACT
Serious discussion of the provision of state pensions began in the 1870s. Serious discussion of alternative forms of state provision for the aged began at the end of the 1870s, with Canon Blackley's proposals for compulsory insurance against old age and sickness. Blackley's proposals were rejected in Britain, at about the same time that Bismarck introduced social insurance in Germany. The debate about the respective merits of contributory or non-contributory pensions continued in Britain until the introduction of the Pensions Act of 1908. The emergence of national insurance did not take the form of the natural evolution sometimes supposed; rather it resulted from the Treasury's refusal to pay for more comprehensive non-contributory benefits, after the experience of the Pensions Act. It was arguable that the insurance approach was better suited to health benefits and to Churchill's unemployment measures of 1911 than to pensions.
