Universal Basic Income

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) for such an impressive and informative speech about what UBI could bring to this country.

I say to the Minister that I stand here making this speech today as a convert to UBI. Two years ago, as the DWP spokesperson at our party conference, I was not in favour of UBI: I did not think that we should dismantle what we have at the moment and considered that we had enough problems with universal credit without going back to scratch. However, that was before I had heard the word “coronavirus” and seen the impact it was going to have on this country. That was before we arrived at a situation where 4.5 million people in the UK were living in poverty.

Coronavirus has changed everything. It has changed everything in much the same way—this metaphor has been used a lot—as the second world war changed everything for this society. When Beveridge put together his report in 1942, a lot of people said that it simply could not work, that it was not sensible and that the country could not afford it. What on earth was he thinking about? And yet, immediately post-war, the Labour Government set about putting that Beveridge report into action. What I say today is that what this country needs now is that kind of vision, and that kind of willingness to take on a challenge and to change society for the better for the next generation. It is not an opportunity that we asked for; it has come in the form of a challenge—probably the biggest challenge that any of us will face in our lifetimes. But we also have to see it as an opportunity to make progress.

Why UBI? The reason I became a convert, frankly, has been the number of phone calls and the number of people who have come to me since March this year—every day, every phone call, every person who thought they were financially secure, every person who spent decades building up a company, every person who was self-employed but now finds that they are without the support they need for the future: all that has convinced me that the only way to tackle the issue fully and to make sure that everyone gets the support they need is through a universal basic income.

UBI would help the people on whom we rely but we often miss: the carers, the people who are low paid. As the hon. Member for Inverclyde said, there should be no stigma or penalty to taking another job, but at the moment there is. I am thinking of people who have worked long hours to get our food to the supermarket shelves who are not on a huge salary and who could do with some help.

My basic plea to the Minister is this: look at whether we can have a trial, to see whether UBI can work and whether we can have the courage that the Government had immediately after the war. That generation looked to Beveridge and thought, “Here is another way. Here is a way of improving society. Here is a way of making a change, a legacy for future generations.”

We have all gone out on a Thursday night and applauded the NHS, which was part of that bigger vision. We have all, at some point in our lives, looked to the welfare state and thought, “Will it be there to help me?” In this, we have seen that it is not. It was a wonderful vision for the 20th century, but we need something new for the 21st century. We need something that makes sure that nobody falls through the cracks as we have seen in this crisis: the 3 million people who have had no support and who, regardless of the Government schemes we hear about, still have no support, no financial safety net, no way out of this from the Government. UBI could provide that.

At the moment, I would not give the Minister a blueprint and say, “This is the one you must follow” because that would be a mistake. We have to look at how we can do it, how it can be affordable and how we make sure that support gets to the people who need it: as I said, the carers, the stay-at-home parents, the people on a low income. They need our support now more than ever.

Two years ago, perhaps, I did not see it, but now I firmly believe that universal basic income is an idea whose time has come. This time needs something special—it needs us to have the courage that a previous generation had to do something radical and progressive. When people look back at this time 20 to 30 years from now, they could have this as something we tried to do and hopefully succeeded in doing for the future.