Kingsley Wood

Who was Kingsley Wood?

Sir Howard Kingsley Wood was an English Conservative politician. The son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, he qualified as a solicitor, and successfully specialised in industrial insurance. He became a member of the London County Council and then a Member of Parliament.

Wood served as junior minister to Neville Chamberlain at the Ministry of Health, establishing a close personal and political alliance. His first cabinet post was Postmaster General, in which he transformed the British Post Office from a bureaucracy to a business. As Secretary of State for Air in the months before the Second World War he oversaw a huge increase in the production of warplanes to bring Britain up to parity with Germany. When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Wood was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which post he adopted policies propounded by John Maynard Keynes, changing the role of HM Treasury from custodian of government income and expenditure to steering the entire British economy.

One of Wood's last innovations was the creation of Pay As You Earn, under which income tax is deducted from employees' current pay, rather than being collected retrospectively.