Enquiry into the Cost of the National Health Service Enquiry into the Cost of the National Health Service The Enquiry into the Cost of the National Health Service, known popularly as the Guillebaud Report, was a 1956 report of the UK Parliament into the financial efficiency of the National Health Service. The chair of the independent Committee of Enquiry, and lead author of the report, was the Cambridge economist C. W. Guillebaud. The enquiry was called by the Conservative government and announced on 1 April 1953 by the then Health Minister, Iain Macleod. The National Health Service (NHS) had been established in 1948 and, in its first few years,
National Health Service (England) published in 1937, had fomented extensive debate about the severe inadequacies of healthcare. The author's innovative ideas were not only essential to the conception of the NHS, but in fact, his best-selling novels are said to have greatly contributed to the Labour Party's victory in 1945. A national health service was one of the fundamental assumptions in the Beveridge Report. The Emergency Hospital Service established in 1939 gave a taste of what a National Health Service might look like. Healthcare prior to the war had been an unsatisfactory mix of private, municipal and charity schemes. Bevan decided that the way