Dear all, we are pleased to invite you to the Workshop on the Catalan Universal Basic Income Pilot Project. It will take place on Thursday 31 March and Friday 1 April and will be accessible online at: www.youtube.com/channel/UCaLnI_z4O-Jw6P8yw8VcUsA.
It will host the discussion around the design pre-proposal of the Catalan Pilot Project (available at: www.rendabasica.gencat.cat) alongside other similar projects. So, various experts on the evaluation of public policies, members of other pilot projects and international scholars will be taking part.
Registration is required (only for those willing to attend in-person) should send an email to bgrafic@gmail.com. Bidirectional translation will be available and participation from the online and in-person public planned in each session. Click here to see the full program.
“All young people leaving care in Wales at the age of 18 are to be offered the chance to take part in a basic income pilot scheme under which they will receive £1,600 a month for up to two years.”
BIEN Co-Founder Guy Standing, President of Catalonia Pere Aragonès, Minister of the Presidency Laura Vilagrà, and Head of the Office of the Pilot Plan to Implement Universal Basic Income Sergi Raventós, Barcelona, November, 2021
The President and Government of Catalonia, part of Spain encompassing seven million people and centered on Barcelona, have announced that there will be a two-year basic income pilot starting next year, providing an unconditional monthly payment to 5,000 individuals.
In November 2020, BIEN co-founder Guy Standing had a long private meeting with the President in his offices about the objectives of the pilot and then held meetings with the officials in charge of designing it, including Sergi Reventós, head of the Office of the Pilot Plan to Implement Universal Basic Income. That office is charged with designing, implementing, and evaluating the Pilot. Raventós hopes the design will be accomplished in 2022 and implementation begun before the end of that year, with evaluation in 2025. The 5,000 participants in the Pilot will be a sample representative of the Catalan social and economic fabric. Funding for the Pilot has been allocated.
Guy Standing will continue to provide technical advice, based on the principles laid out in his recent article, “Basic Income Pilots: Uses, Limitations and Design Principles” in Basic Income Studies, 2021; 16(1) pp 75-99. In a separate event linked to the initiative organized by La Caixa Foundation in the Palau Macaya, he advocated making a link between the commons and basic income.
A further public event to discuss design issues has been scheduled by the Federation of Catalan Social Action Organization with the Barcelona City Council to take place on December 20. Guy Standing will be the keynote speaker. Most importantly, the pilot is seen as a way of showing how Catalonia and Spain could move away from the highly targeted, means-tested social assistance schemes that have fared badly during the Covid pandemic.
Ireland inspires artists, credit for photo: K. Mitch Hodge
The Programme for Government published by Ireland’s new Coalition Government on 27th June, 2020 committed to the introduction of a universal basic income pilot within the lifetime of the Government. Subsequently, the Report of the Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce relied on this commitment when it put forward its proposals for a 3-year Basic Income pilot for workers in the Arts sector.
In Ireland’s Budget for 2022, Government included an allocation of €25m for a Basic Income scheme for artists. While details are sketchy, it would appear that this is intended to fund some 2,000 artists. As this pilot scheme won’t start paying out money till April 2022, it should be possible to pay €325 to 2,000 artists in 2022 within the budget figure of €25m. This is the payment level recommended in the Report of the Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce.
This initiative is most welcome as it progresses the discussion and piloting of Basic Income in Ireland. As well as this, artists are appropriate subjects for the pilot. They have suffered a great deal during the pandemic and should be supported through these difficult times.
However, Ireland can’t afford to pay a Basic Income of €325 per week to the whole population; it is only realistic to pay a maximum of around €208 as outlined by Social Justice Ireland in its recent study on this issue. To resolve this dilemma and ensure the initiative really is a Universal Basic Income pilot, Government could pay these artists €208 as a Basic Income and an additional €117 as an Artists Supplement.
It can be expected that UBI would have two kinds of impact:
Activity, e.g. entrepreneurial, increased/decreased output;
Wellness, e.g. financial security, stress levels.
Regarding the ‘Activity’ impact, it is very likely that the evaluation of the pilot will show that most artists in the pilot don’t watch TV all day. Rather, they will be seen to engage in more artistic activity; they may even generate more market income; they are likely to report that their work is of higher quality; they develop their skills etc. Consequently, if a BI of €325 per week doesn’t elicit a lazy response, surely €208 would not either!
Faced with the above hypothetical findings, I think that those who believe that welfare rates should be kept low so as to push people into working would have to accept the conclusion that there is little to fear from the possibility of laziness with a BI of €208 per week for the whole adult population.
Regarding the ‘Wellness’ impact, it is most likely that the evaluation findings will be positive, e.g. greater financial security, less stress etc. It may be reasonable to speculate that this impact would be reduced if the BI payment were reduced. However, the skeptics on UBI are most interested in the labour market response. They are likely to be less interested in the wellness findings and less concerned if these benefits were reduced somewhat when faced with a BI of €208 per week.
Social Justice Ireland will continue to monitor this initiative as it develops.
Mark Drakeford, First Minister of the Government of Wales (center), Beth Winter, Labor MP for Cynon Valley, and Guy Standing, co-president of BIEN, at the Labor Party Conference
There will be a basic income experiment in Wales in 2022. The First Minister in the devolved Welsh government, Mark Drakeford, has announced his full commitment to rolling it out in the Spring. Following an opinion poll showing that 69% of Welsh people wanted their government to conduct a basic income pilot, the Future Generations Commission arranged for a background report to be prepared, and at an event at the Labor Party Conference in the seaside town of Brighton, Mark Drakeford said he intended to devote the remainder of his time in office to advancing basic income in Wales. He was sharing the platform with Guy Standing, co-president of BIEN, who is advising the Government and Commission on the design of the proposed experiment. Coordinating the plans is the Taskforce for Tackling Poverty in the Welsh Government, headed by Sarah King.
At present, the main proposal is to give basic incomes to “care leavers”, that is, young people emerging into adulthood from care homes. If restricted to those, it would not be a proper basic income pilot, which requires everybody within a geographic community to be covered. In effect, it would be a test of an individual, unconditional modest cash transfer. Given the UK government’s rigid adherence to strict conditional means-tested benefits, which is causing widespread deprivation and a regime of sanctions, the proposed pilot could still prove valuable. However, discussions on the design, sampling and duration are still ongoing. Everything depends on resource constraints.
