§ I am sure it will be a great relief now to know that I am coming to the last item of expenditure—insurance. Experience of the work of the Insurance Act shows the direction in which financial support is needed—I made several statements on the point earlier in the year—and it shows that in spite of the abnormal work of the first year, the resources provided fully justify the actuarial estimate. I further stated that under no conditions would any subsidies be given to make up deficiencies due to mismanagement and malingering, but that there were cases where well-managed societies attracted an unusual proportion of bad lives, or were limited to classes subject to special sickness and disability, and, above all, the working of the Act revealed an appalling amount of sickness among married women, especially under certain conditions, a fact which was quite unknown before the Act. I promised that if deficiencies in these cases were due not to malingering and not to mismanagement, but to circumstances of a kind over which no society had any control, and which demand the assistance of the Government and the support of the State, it would be the business of the Government to recommend to the House of Commons some means of dealing with them. That we propose to do. I do not think it would be desirable at this stage to go into the details. The whole of the burden will not fall upon the State. The societies also must come to the rescue, and I do not think it would be desirable for me to give the general character of the proposals. I think it will be desirable before being finally settled that there should be further consultation with the societies concerned, and, in fact, with the whole of the societies. It is perfectly clear that the Government will have to make a substantial Grant in aid of these very abnormal and distressing cases as far as some of them are concerned.
§ We have to deal with the deposit contributors. We have anticipated that there would be 900,000 deposit contributors, but, as a matter of fact, there are only 400,000. The rest have all joined societies, and out of the 400,000 there are comparatively few who have not joined societies because they 83 cannot join them—very few. There are several who, out of choice, prefer to remain outside. There are several who probably believe that in a few years they will be out of insurance because they will be above the insurance line, and they do not therefore think it worth while to join societies. The number of those who become deposit contributors because they have no other option is very small, and it is a dwindling number, but they are people who deserve a little encouragement and support from the State. And we propose to do something for certain cases of arrears of unemployment. We propose also to establish a system of medical referees who will not merely be a check upon malingering, who will not merely be a class of doctor whom doctors can call into to decide doubtful cases of illness, but they will also be consultants; there will be expert medical men who can be called in for an opinion, not only in cases of malingering, but where there is a serious case of illness, and the ordinary medical man on the panel is not quite sure and wants to get a second opinion. It is proposed to establish clinics in convenient centres to assist the panel doctors to co-operate in difficult cases. We propose to assist in the organisation of a system of health lectures such as they have in Germany, which has done a vast amount of good in spreading the principles of health among the insured population. The total of that will be £1,250,000 for insurance. That is over the whole of the United Kingdom.