UBI – Universal Basic Income is one of those things pops up from time to time, usually I suspect on slow news days. It is, apparently, greatly beloved of Californian tech billionaires who see it as a solution to the mass unemployment created by the increasing automation of human work.
The idea is that the state pays every citizen for simply existing. So is it a bold, revolutionary solution to problems caused by changes in the nature of work or an invitation to idleness?
We already have a UBI for people over the age of 65 in the form of the state pension, so the proposition would be simply to extend it to the rest of the population at a level that would not disincentivise work, but would leave nobody with nothing.
Properly structured, with tax balancing things out at the higher income levels, there are many obvious benefits of which ditching the labyrinthine bureaucracy and cruelty of the current benefits system is just one.
It could (or should) remove beggars from the street. It would provide a 21st century safety net for the many people who rely on short term contracts and who can easily be tipped into debt or homelessness or other situations where a short term glitch can lead to long term poverty.
A recent visitor to Oxford commented on the number of visibly homeless people on the streets. Even allowing for the fact that some of these people aren’t homeless and are playing on people’s compassion, many are.
It isn’t just a change in numbers. The standard response to someone who asks for money for food is to offer to buy them something to eat – this used to terminate the exchange because what they actually wanted was money for booze or drugs and would often say so. Before this year (and going back to the 1980s, when you might be approached several times a day), I can count the number of times the offer of food was taken up on the fingers of one hand. These days, it’s become common for people to accept the offer of a sandwich or a takeaway or, in one case, sausage rolls – people are simply hungry. In the same way, it used to be true that homeless people weren’t just homeless – they usually had multiple and complex problems. These days, the number of people who are simply homeless – faced with the shame and degradation of sleeping rough – are on the rise.
And then there are the people for whom a temporary glitch or domestic crisis is the difference between coping and not coping or a downward spiral of rent arrears and debt; people who can’t afford to replace a broken washing machine, buy a school uniform child or, most ironically, set up a debt relief order.
These situations have knock-on effects for physical and mental health; family relationships and the ability of people to work.
It’s not just the people at the bottom of the economic pile. A UBI could help people who wanted to spend more time caring for their children or elderly relatives or allow them to afford decent wages for professional carers. For others, it would provide a safety net for survival when work temporarily dries up or the seed money to move to another job or another area.
The Welfare State, intended to defeat the Five Giants of Want, Squalor, Disease, Ignorance and Idleness, is becoming increasingly unfit for purpose. Complex rules, punitive benefit sanctions and the tasking of money-hungry commercial enterprises with weeding out of the “undeserving poor” are feeding those giants, not eliminating them.
We’ve moved on. It’s time to abolish the pernicious class divide inherent in our current system. It’s time to acknowledge that the state can’t do everything and trust the to the wisdom of individuals to have greater freedom to manage their own lives. Yes, there are people who will waste money or squander it – that will happen under any system (and governments aren’t exactly in a good position to lecture people about squandering money), but the current system is built around the patronising conceit that people, especially poor people, can’t be trusted and that simply won’t do.
After Work 
It was me, commenting on the number of (seemingly) homeless people on the streets of Oxford. I was making the contrast between what I saw in July 2017 , and what I remembered from when I lived in Oxford, 1982 to 2002. I read in today’s Oxford Mail that the number has increasd by a multiple of four in the last twenty years. I’m sure the reasons are many, but not least must be the closure of mental healthcare beds and the closure of Lucy Faithfull House. I understand that six city centre churches intend opening their facilities this winter and that St Aldates already does.
I am equally sure that some of the beggars with their cardboard signs and begging hats are chancers, and some may not be strictly homeless, albeit “sofa surfing” or staying with unwilling relatives is a form of homelessness.
I’m just back from a stroll through Southampton where the problem is worse than ever. “Homes” comprising cardboard boxes and sleeping bags in the multi storey car parks, and people begging at almost every shop doorway. Under pressure from the council, the Soup Kitchen and rough sleepers’ hostel where I volunteered was closed, I don’t know where the council imagined the clients would go, maybe some other city to be some other council’s problem ? Well as far as I can see they are still here, in greater numbers than ever. Nobody whose address is Eastgate Car Park Level 2 is ever going to get a job; even the most menial of jobs seem now to require qualifications, experience and a reference (The National Trust sacked a gardner with 30 years experience because he didn’t hold the relevant health & safety qualifications). The traditional jobs, labourer on a building site, waiter or bar staff all seem to require some sort of paperwork, even shelf stacking in a supermarket requires a course and exam in food hygiene.
I think Helen has the right idea. Pay us all some sort of Family Allowance, defining “family” as somebody requiring a roof over their head and three meals a day, and do SOMETHING about the housing crisis. Build, build, build.
Not my idea.
One of the problems is benefit sanctions, which means that people really don’t have money, sometimes for the most trivial of reasons – the benefits system actually causing the problem that it’s designed to prevent..
As for health and safety training, a lot of charities that work with homeless people, provide access to this sort of training
Sorry, didn’t mean to credit you with somebody else’s idea.
In respect of the neccesary health & safety training for what are very very basic jobs I can only speak as I experienced it. A lot of people in the UK are not functionally literate. They can cope with every day tasks, but reading long words in long sentences is difficult. I would like to argue that shelf stacking at Sainsbury’s or working as a labourer on a building site requires you neither to be particularly bright nor functionally literate. You soon learn what a 12 pack of Andrex looks like, and the shelf to which it belongs, as you do “move that pile of bricks from there to there”.
When I applied to shelf stack at Sainsbury’s I was required to read a book, albeit it did have pictures, and sit a multiple guess exam on health & safety, food hygiene, and manual handling. Yes, all essential stuff (and almost entirely ignored in reallity, but that’s another story) but folk were failing this exam.
Twenty years ago a chap could wander onto a building site and get a job as a casual labourer, just moving materials around. Now he needs full Personal Protective Equipment, other than the hard hat and high-viz jacket which are usually company branded, all at his cost, so that’s expensive steel capped boots, weatherproof trousers & jacket (no wellies and a donkey jacket now), plus he has to sit a health & safety test and pay for the little plastic card to prove he pased it, all to shift a pile of bricks. That amounts to hundreds of pounds. It’s just unaffordable if you don’t have money to start with.
I’m not knocking Health & Safety, it’s essential, but it’s becoming unattainable or unaffordable.
What I am saying is that the lower ranking jobs for simple people are being lifted out of their reach. Combine that with high private rents, it’s a toxic mix.