The Case for Universal Basic Services. Anna Coote

Introduction

      All of us, however much or little we earn, need certain things to make our lives possible – and worth living. A roof over our heads, nourishing food, education, people to look after us when we can’t look after ourselves, health care when we are ill, water and electricity, transport to take us where we need to go and (these days) access to the internet.

We also need money so that we can pay for some of these things directly, such as food, rent and utility bills, although sometimes we cannot afford them. We pay for other things, such as education and roads, indirectly through taxes because we could never afford to buy them outright unless we were very rich. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service provides free health care at the point of need, so you do not have to worry about the cost of treatment or buying private health insurance. In most rich countries, there are some things that you don’t need to pay for directly because they are collectively provided – although free services sometimes fall short of adequate.

      What all these things have in common is that they are everyday essentials that everybody needs to live a decent life.

      Suppose, then, that we all clubbed together and made sure they were available and affordable for everyone. Suppose we pooled our resources so that the risk of suffering the ruinous consequences of going without one or more of these essentials was shared between us. That’s the goal of universal basic services (UBS): acting together to help each other, and ourselves, so that everyone has access to three things that are fundamental to a successful, peaceful, functioning democracy: security, opportunity and participation.

It is not exactly a new idea. It echoes the ambitions of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and the UK post-war settlement. Both were based on the premise that the whole of society is responsible for – and dependent upon – the well-being of every member of society. Therefore, governments were compelled to act against the scourge of unemployment and poverty and to combat the associated evils of illness, squalid housing and poor education. Funds were gathered through taxes and national insurance schemes to pay for schools, health care, housing and income support for those unable to earn – and all this helped to generate employment and a productive economy. As well as take-home pay, people received a virtual income in the form of public services. This has been described as part of a ‘social wage’ that includes state pensions and benefits. It was worth a great deal to everyone, and especially to those on low incomes, because it met their needs and did not have to be paid for directly.

We still have a virtual income or ‘social wage’ today, but it is much diminished and misunderstood. After the economic disruptions of the 1970s, government policies have chipped away at the post-war consensus and at the value of the social wage. They have done this by promoting a vision of economic success based on personal choice, private ownership, a small state and a free market, blaming the jobless and poor for their own troubles and urging individuals to help themselves. Since 2008, the effects in many countries have been ratcheted up by tax cuts and severely reduced public spending. Where the quality of free schools and health care has declined as a result, more people are encouraged to leave the public system and pay privately for what they need. Many services, including care for children and disabled adults, as well as housing and transport, have been stripped down to the bare bones, abolished altogether or left to the vagaries of voluntarism and philanthropy. This steady erosion of services, often combined with cuts to the value of social security benefits, has led to a deepening rift between rich and poor and to millions living in destitution in the world’s richest countries.

      It doesn’t have to be like this. Our goal is to reclaim the collective ideal and rebuild the social wage. Let’s start by defining our terms.

      ‘Universal basic services’ (UBS) encapsulates three crucial concepts. What we mean by each of them is best described in reverse order. Together they sum up what we mean by ‘public services’ whenever we refer to them in the following pages:

Central to our case is that UBS should be expanded in practice, both by improving the quality of existing services such as health care and education, and reaching into new areas such as care, housing, transport and access to digital information.

      We are seeking radical change that builds on the best we already have. We don’t want to return to the ‘good old days’ or simply to have more of what we’ve had in the past. Our proposal is radical for three main reasons. First, central to our case is the collective ideal, which has been submerged and discredited by the politics of individual choice and market competition. We aim to reverse that trend, recognizing that what we do together and how we care for each other is the key to enabling all of us to meet our needs and live lives that we value.

      Second, we aim for sufficiency and sustainability. Universal basic services form an essential part of an agenda for sustainable development, which we must embrace as a matter of priority to safeguard the future of human civilization.

      Third, we are seeking to overhaul the traditional model of public services so that they are genuinely participative, controlled by the people who need and use them, and supported rather than always directly provided by the state.

We need these radical changes now, not just because we want to help make people’s lives better (which we do) but because we are convinced that this is the only way for modern societies to survive and flourish. Existing welfare systems are struggling to meet today’s needs. They haven’t adapted far or fast enough to demographic, technological and ecological challenges. They have come under sustained attack from political forces that seek to shrink the state and grow the market. People are being driven apart by an ideology that promotes individualism, competition and accumulation, which in turn have stifled aspirations, heightened insecurities, exacerbated environmental problems and accelerated political polarization. All these things undermine democracies, which depend for their health and strength on shared interests and goals, mutual understanding and cooperation.

We want this book to fuel a big debate about how to tackle today’s urgent problems, such as widening inequalities, crumbling welfare systems and unsustainable consumption. We focus here on a particular range of needs to illustrate our approach. But we certainly do not want to limit the scope of UBS, which could extend much