Camden Council and the Institute for Global Prosperity call for a new universal welfare settlement fit for the 21st century
Cllr. Georgia Gould and Prof. Henrietta L. Moore
Read the full PDF version here- Universal Basic Services: A new welfare settlement fit for the 21st century
Where we are now
It’s hard to escape the feeling that our lives and livelihoods are much more precarious than we would like. The cost of living crisis, the climate emergency, the prospect of automation in the workplace, and pressures on public budgets constitute an unprecedented set of challenges to our established ways of delivering public services and how we think about the economy.
To move out of this insecurity, we need to go through positive transitions as a society, including a just transition to net-zero and a transition towards a more productive and inclusive economy.
As the Leader of the London Borough of Camden and the Founder and Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) at University College London, we share an ambition, which is for everyone to thrive and prosper and to be supported by the places they live in and the public services in their neighbourhood.
Our current welfare system failed to provide an adequate safety net even before Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis, which have further exacerbated inequality and deprivation. Aside from the paucity of the benefits, which the government has allowed inflation to devalue, the system doesn’t provide security.
The benefit system’s complex web of thresholds, eligibility criteria, and conditional entitlements is meant to restrict access rather than provide security in times of need. The DWP’s sanctions regime epitomises this problem. We do not believe that a system that enforces compliance through sanctions that can leave people destitute is fit for our times. We urgently need a welfare system that responds to the challenges of the current decade and beyond.
A welfare system that is efficient, embedded in the social fabric of communities and works with the grain of social infrastructure to provide more resilience. One that helps people live healthy and happy lives rather than causing anxiety and distress. We need a radical re-imagining of what a 21st century welfare system could and should be—a vision that combines social welfare, strong local economies, environmental justice, and citizen-oriented government with a more productive national economy.
What are Universal Basic Services?
Universal Basic Services (UBS) are free and more widely accessible public services that enable every citizen to live a larger life by ensuring access to safety, opportunity, and participation. It’s an approach to public services that focuses on how different kinds of insecurity interact and manifest in people’s lives and tackles their root causes through a whole-systems approach at the local level.
The seven UBS are:
Transport: This includes public transportation, such as buses, trains, and subways, as well as walking and cycling infrastructure.
Food: This includes access to healthy and affordable food, as well as community kitchens and other food assistance programs.
Information: This includes access to the internet, libraries, and other sources of information.
Local democracy: This includes access to participation in local government, as well as opportunities for other forms of civic engagement.
Health & care: This includes access to healthcare, mental health services, and long-term care.
Education: This includes access to schools, nurseries and childcare.
Shelter: This includes access to affordable housing and utilities, as well as homelessness prevention programs.
UBS are designed to provide a foundation for a secure and good life, regardless of income or employment status.
UBS in Action
Many public services in the UK already fit this description— think of libraries, schools, and the NHS. Others do not— social housing and social care have thresholds to direct them to those most in need, while the internet and public transport are commodities that we pay for.
But some places in the UK and abroad are moving towards free and universal access to public goods. Since 2010, Housing First pilots in the West Midlands, Liverpool and Manchester have been offering people who have experienced homelessness and chronic health and social care needs a stable home along with unconditional person-centred and holistic support.
The Mayor of London has announced that the Greater London Authority will fund free school meals for every primary school pupil in London in the 2023/24 academic year.
The Scottish Government have introduced free bus travel for those aged 5 to 21— almost a million young people— with the latest data showing more than 50% take-up. Similar approaches are being undertaken in New Zealand and British Columbia (Canada).
In towns and cities around the world, public transport is being made free. For example, Dunkirk in Northern France has offered free bus travel since 2018, and Dangjin City, South Korea, has offered free public transport since 2019. There is evidence that such initiatives have reduced car usage and transport costs for residents.
Digital access initiatives such as the IGP’s ‘Connecting Communities’ project in Tower Hamlets, which provided households with free internet access, devices and training, have demonstrated the economic and health benefits of improving people’s access to education, employment and other services.
Free and affordable broadband is being rolled out in Kerala (India) with a programme of digital skills and infrastructure improvements also being implemented.
Camden Council and the IGP have been individually and jointly working towards redefining what a local welfare system could and should be, through joint policy papers, prototyping new approaches, adopting innovative responses to persistent challenges such as Housing First, elevating local voices to help define and design local priorities, and going above and beyond to proactively support residents through the cost of living crisis.
We now want to build on this to make the case for a new welfare settlement that is shaped by place and responsive to local needs. We’re making a bold pitch for a paradigm shift in how we think about the welfare state, similar to the political leaps that established universal education, public pensions, and the NHS.
Our Call for UBS
We believe that our welfare system needs new foundations: universalism, whole systems thinking, democratic participation, and ecological consciousness. So today, we are launching a joint effort to build a new vision for:
A 21st-century place-based welfare settlement
Over the next two to three years, we are going to explore the role of UBS as the cornerstone of a new place-based welfare system for the UK, looking at how a welfare system with universalism at its heart can enhance people’s capabilities, and promote financial security, wellbeing, innovation, productivity and growth.
Working across a broad coalition drawn from local government, academia, think tanks, and the voluntary sector, we will be undertaking the most comprehensive pilots of universal services ever imagined in an advanced economy. We want to put in place multiple, connected, robust experiments that will build the evidence over time that makes the case for a new place-based welfare settlement.
Building on our previous pilots on digital and transport, our experiments will feature packages of universal services – potentially including support for housing, food, transport, digital, education, legal advice, and care – which will be made available across a range of varied local areas. Importantly, our model will be responsive to place.
This means designing and delivering packages that respond to local conditions, the needs of local people, and the issues that matter most in the local area. We know from our experience of the current welfare system that a one-size-fits-all approach set at a national level cannot work well everywhere, and so local leaders and local people need to be empowered to set the direction in the places they know best.
Citizen participation and deliberative engagement are a fundamental part of this. We will be bringing together people and stakeholders from across the country to deliberate together and shape our pilot projects, share experiences from accessing new universal services, and devise a longer-term roadmap for change.
We believe that this project has the potential to demonstrate how universal services that are shaped by communities can provide secure foundations for people to thrive, and that they can be transformative for communities and places. Equally, we believe that strong and cohesive public services are a necessary condition for local prosperity and local capability to tackle crises such as the cost of living and the climate emergency, while also providing opportunities for increased social and economic participation.
This approach is realistic, requiring a more progressive approach to taxation, but it is achievable within the architecture of the current system. Creating a proper foundation can actually be the basis for accelerating growth by increasing spending power, reducing unnecessary social costs, and supporting a flourishing of entrepreneurial activity because evidence increasingly shows inequality fetters innovation.
We know it will take time to gather the evidence, but this is an opportunity for us— and for everyone who wants to work with us— to build the case for a new kind of welfare state. This is the time to make a bold case for universal services as a model that will help us respond to the needs of a modern and successful society in the 21st-century.
What can you do?
We want to bring together a broad coalition to create a paradigm shift for revitalised welfare settlements around the world. We want to work and partner with other local authorities across the country to design models and packages of universal services that respond to the needs and opportunities of different places.
What Camden needs in terms of public services is not what Greenwich needs, and what London needs is not what Manchester needs, and what South East England needs is not what Scotland needs. Only by working across many varied areas can we establish a case for universal services as the model for a nationwide welfare settlement.
We also want to partner with organisations with an interest in poverty, welfare, service design, and aspects of public policy like housing, transport, and food to work with us to create pilot projects.
We will need a coalition of many talents across civil society, academia, and philanthropy to support this work with time, energy, resources, and technical expertise. Our door is open to anyone who wants to play a part.
If you are interested in this work and want to partner with us, please contact us at: igp@ucl.ac.uk
We know that this is ambitious. We are looking at re-modelling the UK’s welfare settlement on a new set of principles— something that has only rarely been done in our modern history. But the paradigm has shifted before, and we can see in our history how quickly a new idea can capture the public imagination.
Coming out of the experience of Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis, we are committed to building the case for a new place-based welfare settlement.
Join us on this journey to rethink the welfare system for the 21st century.