Universal Basic Income: Evidence Review

"There’s also the report from What Works Scotland, which is a systematic review of pilots. It looks in depth at the evidence emerging from a whole range of basic income-like schemes across the world, including the US and various other places. In the vast majority of cases where there’s a periodic, modest, and secure payment made to people, you get an increase in mental health, a reduction in anxiety and depression, and an increase in activity that’s needed in left behind communities in particular. So there’s entrepreneurial activity and retraining, that kind of thing. You also get the subsidization of caring roles, and given the increase in costs around social care, it’s important to recognize that familial involvement in caring is really quite an important socio-economic activity and contribution to a country. You see improvements in all of those things. The schemes are always short-term, so the longer-term impacts of physical health are less clearly established, but the evidence from studies of changes in income suggests significant improvements. Where you see potential harms is when people are given large sums of money on a one-off basis. In the Alaska dividend scheme, people often get really quite big cash payouts every 12 months. There is an increase in bingeing activity under those circumstances. As you can imagine, you’ve suddenly got this whacking great amount of money in your account, and this can produce lottery win-style behaviour. Nobody who’s in favor of basic income is suggesting that we ought to do that. It ought to be modest, secure, and predictable. There is no alternative. People keep suggesting we just tweak Universal Credit, or provide training schemes, or better ad hoc responses to things as they get worse. There’s no evidence that that’s ever been able to deal with the kind of challenges that we face at the minute, including economic inactivity associated with conditional welfare schemes. Reducing the amount of income that people have access to will only make people’s health and other outcomes worse. We see that with the cost-of-living crisis and its impact on people’s health. It’s not clear that there is any existing system that can cope with the scale of the challenge that we’ve got. Britain has been run down over the course of several decades and hasn’t been given the investment it needs in order to function. We are so low now that we cannot afford not to make a massive investment in ourselves. A business would be bankrupt by this stage through its constantly selling off its assets and running down its workforce. We really have to choose whether to invest and survive or not invest and see our society get worse and worse. Yes, the Common Sense Policy Group is an interdisciplinary research team, and we come from a range of different backgrounds. My background is in politics. Daniel Nettle, who wrote the majority of the book, is a behavioural scientist. Kate Pickett is an epidemiologist and co-author of The Spirit Level . Howard Reed is an economist, Elliott Johnson has a background in public policy, and Ian Robson in social work. The book brings together those different perspectives to create what we think is a fairly coherent account of what would happen were basic income to be introduced. We’ve got a focus on basic income as a response to social insecurity, but we’ve got a much broader range of interests in public policy. Act Now examines a whole range of different challenges in infrastructure, capital spending, taxation, and dealing with the climate crisis, all these sorts of areas. It shows the way in which basic income has to be accompanied by much broader changes to the investment that we make as a society. Trains, roads, energy generation, the national grid, the shift away from carbon production etc."