Between the end of the First World War and the mid-1940s hospital provision became an increasingly politicized field of social policy. National debates were prompted by the financial crisis of the early 1920s, the introduction of the 1929 Local Government Act and the series of reports and surveys produced in the later 1930s which laid the basis for national state involvement. Central to these discussions were considerations of who should finance and who should control public hospital services and while general issues of state subsidy arose, it was the relationship between the voluntary hospitals and the local state which occupied the key area of debate. In analysing these debates historians have usually looked to national sources and the positions adopted by leading pressure groups such as the BMA or the British Hospital Association, especially in the period from 1937. There has been a tendency to emphasize Labour hostility to the voluntary system and support for a state-run service under the control of the municipality as espoused in The Labour Movement and the Hospital Crisis (1922). Those on the right, along with the medical elite, are less clearly drawn but are seen to provide consistent support to the voluntary sector coupled to a fear of municipal control. The Ministry of Health attempted to maintain a neutral line in these disputes but seems to have become increasingly hostile to the voluntary sector and their supporters in the contributors' associations.