Basic Income: The Idea Whose Time Has Come
Benefit payouts (including the state pension) are expected to come to about £171 billion in 2015/16.
The total lifetime implementation cost of Universal Credit, the UK plan to streamline benefits distribution, is reported to be just under £16 billion.
By 2020 a further £3 billion will have been paid out to contractors under the Government's back to work programme. Indeed the ‘welfare to work’ sector employs nearly 20,000 people. A whole industry has developed dedicated to helping people who can’t find employment.
The housing association sector is currently spending unprecedented time campaigning against benefit cuts and and ever tighter restrictions on claimants. Vitally important work, but ultimately just about buying time — staving off the inevitable for a few more years.
Surely there’s got to be a better way than this?
Imagine if we scrapped it all. Imagine if we killed the endless bureaucracy — and the whole of this poverty industry — and replaced it with a new system.
A system where every citizen, in work or not, got a flat subsistence allowance, which would be unaffected by any earnings they gained on top of it.
No top ups though. If you want four kids and can’t work you can have them — but you’ll still only get the basic. And you’ll still get the same amount if you’re in the One Percent. It’s the ultimate in equitable systems.
The idea of a universal basic income is certainly nothing new — but seemed to gain momentum in 2015 resulting in a test in Utrecht. In this trial a pilot group will get about £150 a week, whether working or not. The unemployed won’t be beset by ‘professionals’ trying to find them work and the hope is that the state will spend less money snooping on benefit claimants. Ralf Embrechts, director of the Social Development Association outlined the principles of the test in a Quartz article
“We want to discover, if you trust people and give them a basic income without any rules or obligations — so, unconditionally — that they will do the right thing,”
In case anyone thinks this is too much of a radical departure let’s remember that welfare as a concept— and the idea of helping people back to work — is only 100 years old. Paid employment itself is only about 300 years old, a blink of an eye in human history.
This should be the year we give serious thought to a UK test. Housing Associations handover the keys to brand new communities everyday — many of these have a significant proportion of benefit claimants. Is it fanciful to imagine a collaboration between housing, the Department of Work and Pensions and the likes of the innovation think tank Nesta? (Who incidentally named basic income as one of the top 10 2016 trends). The Utrecht test is fairly small — up to 250 people — so replicating this over a mixed tenure community isn’t prohibitively expensive.
Jobs are starting to disappear and it’s time to start creating a new future — not wasting energy fighting to retain a 20th century system. We need to start to reimagine communities and what meaningful work and play looks like. We should begin long-term planning — building from the skills already in the community. We need to embrace technology and develop local frameworks that enable people to do better things.
Basic income has to happen — and it may be what unleashes a new wave of innovation across the UK.
