Some thoughts regarding Basic Income and how it can positively affect citizens and neighbourhoods
This blog is based one of the talks given at the MPs briefing on basic income, from members of the UK’s Basic Income Movement on 27th February 2025.
Growth is at the centre of political debate today, and many politicians pin their hopes on being able to bring the economy to the levels of economic growth that we saw in the post-war years. But economic growth has been difficult to achieve in Western economies in recent decades, and increasing inequality, despite all the claims for trickle down economics, has done nothing to bring growth back to life—quite the opposite.
We say that growth is good, but while some kinds of growth are good, many forms of growth are actually dangerous. Real growth must have 3 key qualities:
Value - Growth must lead to real qualitative improvements in people’s lives. This doesn’t mean more shopping; it means growth in meaning and relationship. Growth in size, with no real growth in value, is like obesity.
Scope - Growth must reach everyone and every part of the country. Growth that is focused on one small group of people or on one place is more like a cancer than growth; and as the cancer grows, the rest of the country suffers.
Sustainability - Growth must be sustainable. It must leave our soil, our wildlife, our buildings and our communities richer and stronger. Growth that is driven by debt, extraction or exploitation can quickly become self-destructive. This is the path to which the current economic system seems committed.
But there are people, up and down the country, who are working to a different model where citizen action creates real growth. In fact, in my experience, it is the people who are furthest from positions of formal power who seem to understand best what is necessary. It is people who already face disadvantage who are showing up and demonstrating what can be achieved if we work together. It is often in places that are soon described as being “left behind” where people are showing that they can figure out how to create the kind of growth that really matters. For example:
In Intake, a neighbourhood of Doncaster, more than 3,000 people with mental health problems, and disabilities have come together to form of network of peer support and community action. They have generated millions of pounds worth of social value simply by choosing to come together and act like citizens.
In Coalville, in Leicestershire, local people have come together to form a Community Benefit Society so that they can purchase back derelict buildings and put them to community use.
In Goldthorpe, near Barnsley, local people, including children, have come together to paint the old industrial bridges and transform their local landscape.
In Cornwall, people with learning disabilities have come together to create Citizen Checkers, to monitor how effectively support services are supporting people to live lives of citizenship.
In Whitley Bay, people with learning disabilities run the local community market.
In Sheffield, we recently hosted the Fearless Cities Summit, and over 400 people came together to discuss how to tackle the challenges we face.
If we start from the grassroots, things look very different. People can decide for themselves what is valuable, and they can create their own sustainable solutions.
If we only look at what is measured by money, we miss all the many things that people do for free, and we fail to appreciate all the sources of value in our communities. A few years ago, we calculated the social value of unpaid care provided in Barnsley. It turned out that it was worth more than all the NHS spending in Barnsley (even using a very low level for calculating social value).
We also calculated the social value that lay dormant, but which could be activated if people had the right supporting structures and incentives. By our measures, the dormant citizen capacity in Barnsley is equivalent to about £1.3 billion. This is 7 times more than local government spending.
The biggest barrier we face in growing citizen action is the tax-benefit system. The benefit system (DWP) is not fit for purpose. It is still working to an economic model that assumes people have long-term, secure employment and that families have one ‘bread-winner’ responsible for all earnings. The system was designed for the economy of the 1950s.
Worse, we have not really left behind the legacy of the nineteenth-century Poor Law. People who receive benefits are treated with suspicion, scrutinised and kept under constant supervision. If they make a mistake - or often when the system makes a mistake - they are sanctioned. Currently, contributing to your community is a punishable offence.
On top of this, since the 1970s, the impact of the benefit system has changed. It used to be a system that moved money from the better off to the worse off. But gradually, the poorest have been targeted by a combination of increased indirect taxation and reduced benefits, so that in 2023, we reached a point of complete absurdity:
In fact, over this 50 year period, what has happened is that the system has been designed to uplift middle incomes. This is because these key political groups (the swing voters) have been experiencing the impact of a hollowing out of the whole economy. Only the richest 15% have seen any real growth in their incomes over this whole 50 year period. For most people, real growth is long gone.
So we now have a benefit apparatus that people experience as brutal and unsupportive. It is centralised and out of step with the times. But even worse, its impact is nullified by the tax system. The best solution would be to merge the DWP into HMRC and to apply the working principles of the tax system:
Protect people’s individual entitlements
Start from a position of trust and self-assessment
If we combined these two government departments, we could, over time, introduce a basic income for everyone and redesign the system so that people benefited from:
Economic security is essential, but there are other things we need to do to help realise the enormous potential of citizens. For instance, we also need a new framework for local action designed around neighbourhoods.
This is something we we’re working on in Sheffield. Citizens came together and identified 147 neighbourhoods in the City, and today we’re working to design new forms of democratic structure that encourage people to come together, make decisions and take action. This is about transforming our democratic arrangements, building power at the grassroots, but also designing systems of decision-making that are fitting for complex problems at different levels.
This is also about the way public services are organised. Many professionals are demoralised by increasing centralisation and are desperate to get back to direct work in neighbourhoods. The Buurtzorg model from the Netherlands has demonstrated that professionals can be much more effective if they self-manage their work and stay close to the community they serve.
Currently, the DWP spends £200,000 per neighbourhood on its ineffective privatised Work Programme. Imagine if this money were invested in local communities, under local control and was organised to help young and old find work and create new business opportunities.
In fact, this neighbourhood approach would have a direct economic benefit. Local money, local jobs and a circular economy are critical for redistributing resources fairly across the whole of the country.
In South Yorkshire, we’ve now agreed a Neighbourhood Care Strategy in order to rethink how to support local people and services to take better care of each other. This is a model that would be supercharged if Westminster were to back a basic income.
Ultimately, the whole welfare system needs to change. We need to leave behind our 19th century Poor Law mentality. We need to leave behind the industrial assumptions of the mid-twentieth century. We need to organise our system so that it ensures everyone has enough to function as a full, equal and contributing citizen. We don’t just need Universal Basic Income, we need Universal Basic Citizenship.
