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 point of use for people ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom, apart from dental treatment and optical care. (The English NHS also requires patients to pay prescription charges with a range of exemptions from these charges.) Dr Somerville Hastings, President of the Socialist Medical Association, successfully proposed a resolution at the 1934 Labour Party Conference that the party should be committed to the establishment of a State Health Service. Conservative MP and Health Minister, Henry Willink, first proposed the National Health Service in 1944 with the publication of a White Paper "A National Health Service" which was widely distributed in