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,
History of the National Health Service over by Aneurin Bevan in Clement Attlee's Labour Party government after the war ended. Bevan decided that the 1944 white paper's proposal for local authority control of voluntary hospitals was not workable, as he felt that local authorities were too small to manage hospitals. He decided that "the only thing to do was to create an entirely new hospital service, to take over the voluntary hospitals, and to take over the local government hospitals and to organise them as a single hospital service". This structure of the NHS in England and Wales was established by the National Health Service Act