UK: UBI Debate Held in House of Commons

A debate about universal basic income was held in the House of Commons of the British Parliament on Wednesday, September 14.

A video of the debate is viewable on the Parliament website (the debate on UBI begins at 16:37), and TheyWorkForYou has a published the transcript.

Ronnie Cowan (“as in cow, as in ‘moo’”), MP from the Scottish National Party, opened the debate. Cowan has advocated for UBI in the past, such as at the SNP’s spring conference.

Ronnie Cowan MP
Source: snp.org

In his opening remarks, Cowan emphasized that the UK’s current welfare system is not working:

If we were all given a blank sheet of paper and asked to design a welfare system, nobody—but nobody—would come up with the system we have now. They would need thousands of sheets of paper and would end up with a mishmash of abandoned projects, badly implemented and half-hearted ideas and a system so complicated that it lets down those who need it the most.

Throughout the debate, Cowan advanced additional reasons to favor a UBI–as did other supporters. Notably, the discussion was joined by the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas–a long-standing proponent of UBI who, last June, tabled an Early Day Motion calling on the national government to commission and fund research on basic income. Among other concerns,

Caroline Lucas MP
CC BY 3.0 Tanoshimi

Lucas voiced worries about automation and precarity in the labor market:

Well-paid jobs on permanent contracts have dwindled, while short-term, zero-hours contracts and bogus self-employment are rife. Alongside a genuine national living wage, a basic income would provide a vital buffer against this new age of insecurity and an escape route for those caught in the trap between a complex, punitive and quite simply outdated social security system and low-paid, insecure and all too often exploitative employment.

Lucas also pointed out that basic income recognizes the value of unpaid labor:

There is far more work that needs to be done than that which is simply parcelled up into what we call jobs. We only have to look around our local communities to see railings that need painting, older people who need visiting and allotments that people would love to tend, but we cannot necessarily do many of those things—they are in some ways important economic activities—because right now we are penalised for doing so.

Other debate participants included Paul Monaghan (SNP), Eilidh Whiteford (SNP), Geraint Davies (Labour), Kate Green (Labour), Debbie Abrahams (Labour), Julian Knight (Conservative), and Damian Hinds (Conservative).

Whiteford and Abrahams both evinced some attraction to UBI, and expressed their intent to “keep an open mind”. However, they registered skepticism–or at least caution–with respect to some of the details in implementing the policy. For example, Abrahams notes that “[t]o allow for variations in need, UBI would need to be supplemented with additional top-ups, increasing its expense and complexity”, leading to the worries that a UBI might be either too costly to implement or fail to help those with greatest need.

On the opposing side, Knight and, especially, Hinds challenged Cowan on the cost of UBI and the potential for UBI to disincentivize work. Hinds stressed the virtues of the UK’s current system of universal credit in recognizing the value of work (viz., paid employment):

The Government’s approach to welfare has been about recognising the value and importance of work, making work pay and supporting people into work, while protecting the most vulnerable. A universal basic income goes against every aspect of that approach.

Basic Income UK co-ordinator Barb Jacobson welcomed the debate–the first of its kind by MPs in this generation. About critics like Knight and Hinds, she says, “Even though the Tory response was predictably negative, we know there are some MPs on that side interested in it.”

She complained, however, about what she saw as one serious omission:

[It was] a shame the MPs who supported basic income didn’t bring up the high marginal tax rates on current welfare – and on Universal Credit for that matter (was originally supposed to be around 75%, now with cuts more like 85-90%). This is the key reason any ‘benefit trap’ exists. This is something basic income eliminates because people would be taxed only on what they earn on top of it.

The Citizen’s Income Trust, BIEN’s UK affiliate, calls the debate “fair and well-informed”. However, the CIT goes on to point out that the MPs overlooked some of the CIT’s research on basic income schemes for the UK. Damian Hinds cites the CIT as concluding that a basic income would require “huge amounts of additional tax” and still create “many losers”. However, another scheme studied by the CIT “shows that an increase in Income Tax rates of only 3% would be required for a Citizen’s Income of £60 per week, that such a scheme would generate almost no losses among low income households” (as stated in the CIT’s blog post).

The House of Commons Library has published an accompanying Research Briefing. The Research Briefing contains a thorough overview of recent publications on the prospects of a UBI for Britain, including reports published in the last year by the RSA, Compass, and the Fabian Society. Additionally, it provides information about planned basic income experiments in Finland, the Dutch city of Utrecht, and the Canadian province of Ontario.

The Research Briefing clarifies that–despite the current of interest in UBI among British politicians, labor unions, and think tanks–the UK government “has not undertaken any research on Universal Basic Income proposals, and has no current plans to do so”.

More Information:

Video of the Westminster Hall debate on UBI (begins at 16:37)

Transcript of debate

Parliamentary Research Briefing on UBI

Citizen’s Income Trust blog post on the debate

Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan

Image: “MPs Debate in House of Commons Chamber” CC BY-NC 2.0 UK Parliament