Two of Paul Spicker’s recent blog posts are relevant to the Citizen’s Basic Income debate.
In an article written on the 22nd September he summarises his contribution to a new book, in which he proposes the following reforms to social security benefits:
- … Move away from means-testing, with greater reliance on contributory benefits and universal allowances.
- Rethink how things are done: aim to have benefits with simpler rules, fewer conditions, fewer personal adjustments and longer time scales.
- Secure benefits for disability to secure their financial status and their dignity.
- Protect the position of children in disrupted families by directing benefits to the child
- Improve provision for the oldest pensioners.
- … Protect people better during the interruption of earnings caused by sickness and unemployment.
- Separate benefits and employability provision; they are doing different things.
On the same day, he wrote an article about Universal Credit:
… The very belated Final Business Case claimed that UC will gain £24.5 bn in people choosing to work more, £10.5 bn in distributional improvements, and £9.1 billion in reduced fraud and error. The National Audit Office has told us that “We cannot be certain that Universal Credit will ever be cheaper to administer than the benefits it replaces”; their 2018 report said that
the extended timescales and the cost of running Universal Credit compared to the benefits it replaces cause us to conclude that the project is not value for money now, and that its future value for money is unproven.
We now know that the figure on fraud and error is wrong, and that Universal Credit has made fraud and error much worse; and ‘distributional improvements’ don’t save money, they move it to a different place. So the only possible saving could be by encouraging people into work, and given that only a very small proportion of claimants are continuously unemployed – the majority of claimants are too ill to work, carers, short-term unemployed or already working on low incomes – it isn’t going to be anything like £24.5bn. If I had to guess, I would estimate the net gain, by comparison with the previous system, at something closer to zero.