Where the floor gives

Somewhere in most working lives, there comes a moment when the ground starts to give. A job goes. An industry contracts. A skill that used to pay the rent has stopped paying it. What follows is rarely just a question about money. It is a question about what the country owes a person who has done nothing wrong except find themselves on the wrong side of an economic change.

Most of us know someone who has experienced this. A parent made redundant in their fifties who never quite found steady work again. A friend whose industry vanished. A sibling priced out of the town where they grew up. For most of the last forty years, the British answer to this kind of bad luck has been a benefits system that pays you a small amount of money, judges you for needing it, and trusts the market to sort out the rest. That system has been failing for a long time, and most people can feel it failing, even if they don’t have a name for why.

There is one area where we still do better. If you’re hit by a car, you don’t arrive at A&E worrying about whether you can afford it. If your child needs an asthma inhaler, you don’t ration it. The NHS is the closest thing this country has to a guarantee of dignity. It works because, after the war, we decided to take healthcare out of the market and treat it as a necessity for everyone to participate in the life of the country. We complain about it constantly (we have a reputation for a reason), and we would not give it up.

There is an idea that proposes doing for the other essentials of modern life what the NHS did for healthcare. It has a name, Universal Basic Services, or UBS, and it has been quietly worked out by economists over the last decade, costed by people who do this for a living, and tested in pieces in a dozen countries already. The basic shape is straightforward. Take the things every person needs in order to participate in a modern economy: healthcare, education, a decent home, the bus to get to work, the chance to retrain when the work changes, a basic standard of food and a working internet connection. Provide them as a universal right, free at the point of use, paid for out of general taxation. The model is the NHS. The proposal is to do for the rest of life’s essentials what we already did for one of them.

What follows is the argument for why this is the policy Britain actually needs, why it would make life materially better for most people reading this, and how we could afford it if we were willing to be honest about who currently isn’t paying their share.

Why services beat cash

The reason this argument matters now is that the kind of bad luck described at the start of this piece is becoming more common, not less. The shape of work is changing faster than it used to. Whole industries, including high street retail, taxi driving, parts of journalism, and soon large chunks of office and warehouse work, are being reshaped by automation and artificial intelligence. This is happening now. Every government in the rich world is starting to ask what to do about it.

The welfare state we still have was designed for a different country. It was built in the late 1940s for an economy in which most people stayed in one industry for a working life, in which a single wage was expected to support a family, in which council housing was built, and unions kept wages rising in line with productivity. Almost none of that is still true. People now change careers two or three times. Two incomes are required to cover what one used to. Councils build almost nothing. Wages have stagnated for a generation. The benefits system has been patched and patched again to keep pace, but the underlying design hasn’t changed since my grandparents got married. We are running a 1948 operating system in a 2026 economy, and we shouldn’t be surprised it keeps crashing.

There are two answers on the table worth taking seriously. One has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. It is called Universal Basic Income, or UBI. The idea is simple. The government pays every adult a regular sum of money, no questions asked. Maybe £80 a week, maybe £100, maybe more. It would replace some existing benefits, sit alongside others, and, the theory goes, give everyone a financial cushion against the chaos of modern work. Pilots have been run in Wales, Finland, and parts of the United States. People on both the left and the right have backed the idea.

Universal Basic Services starts from the same problem and reaches a different conclusion. Instead of giving people cash to buy the things they need, it provides the things directly. Both ideas come from the same impulse, that nobody in a rich country should fall below a basic standard of living, but they differ on a question that turns out to matter a great deal. Where does the money end up?

The trouble with cash is that it doesn’t sit still. If the government gives every adult an extra £100 a week, it doesn’t actually stay as £100 in anyone’s pocket, not for long. In any place where housing is in short supply, landlords notice. Rents rise. Bills rise. The extra cash gets built into the price of the things people already have to pay for. We have been watching this happen in slow motion through Housing Benefit and the housing element of Universal Credit, which together now cost the UK over £20 billion a year. The money flows from the taxpayer through the tenant to the landlord’s account. Rents haven’t come down.

UBS doesn’t have this problem because UBS doesn’t move money through markets at all. It builds the floor directly. You can’t bid up the price of a thing the state is already providing, which is why nobody profits off A&E.

There’s a second reason, and it ought to interest anyone who cares about value for money. Providing things at scale is cheaper than buying them one by one. The NHS costs about £1 of every £10 the country makes each year, and delivers longer lives than the American healthcare system, which costs nearly £1 of every £6 and delivers shorter ones. The reason is unglamorous. A single buyer negotiating drug prices on behalf of 67 million people has more leverage than 67 million people negotiating individually. The same logic applies, with the same force, to childcare, transport, training, and broadband. We already know that providing things at scale works. We have just stopped extending the principle.

What it looks like

In practice, the picture is less radical than it sounds. Most of UBS already existed somewhere, in another country, or in this one, a generation ago. The proposal is to assemble the pieces.

Take adult retraining, the rung the welfare state forgot to build. In England, the number of publicly funded adult further education courses fell from 5.4 million in 2004-05 to 1.7 million in 2024-25, a 70% decline over 20 years. The share of adults who say cost is the main thing stopping them from learning has tripled since 2019. A UBS retraining guarantee, a right at any age to a year’s worth of vocational training, funded directly, would cost real money. It would also be the difference for the 47-year-old warehouse manager whose job has just been taken over by a robot, between an HGV licence that gets him back to work and a redundancy notice that doesn’t.

Childcare from nine months, free at the point of use. Most of Scandinavia has been doing this for thirty years. For parents at the school gates in those countries, it means roughly what free secondary school means in Britain: a service you assume is there, that costs you nothing, that you build your life around. In the UK, by contrast, childcare is routinely the single biggest line in a young family’s budget. In much of the country it costs more than the mortgage. Bringing it into the public system pays for itself within a decade through the additional earnings of parents, still mostly mothers, who can then actually go to work.

Free local public transport. Luxembourg has had it nationally since 2020. Tallinn has had it for residents since 2013. The buses in Dunkirk have been free since 2018. None of these places have collapsed. What they have done is remove a daily tax on getting to work that falls hardest on the people who can least afford to pay it: the cleaner who takes two buses to a shift at a hotel, or the shop worker on a zero-hours contract who can’t afford to turn down the call.

Housing, and by housing I mean actual houses, not Housing Benefit. The shift from building homes to subsidising rents is probably the policy mistake of the last forty years. We now spend more, in a single year, propping up private rents than it would cost to run a substantial council house-building programme. The money goes to the same place either way. The difference is whether, at the end of it, the country has more homes or just richer landlords. A council housing programme on the scale we need would not just save money over time. It would give people something Britain hasn’t had in three decades: secure rents, secure tenancies, and the right to paint your own walls.

Broadband is treated as a utility. In 2026, you cannot apply for a job, book a GP appointment, claim a benefit or speak to your child’s school without an internet connection. Services that we need expect you to have a connection, so the country has implicitly decided that broadband is essential and has left the cost of being connected to households. A working internet line is now as important to participating in the economy as a working phone line was thirty years ago, and we treated phone lines as a regulated utility for a reason.

A national food infrastructure: school meals extended through the holidays, properly funded community kitchens, and an end to the choice between heating and eating that nobody in a country this rich should be making. A hungry child can’t learn. A hungry adult can’t work well. We have known this for a hundred years. The answer has always been the same, and we should stop being squeamish about it. Feed people.

None of these has to be built at once. The country won’t wake up one morning to find UBS in place; that isn’t how anything in Britain gets done. You start with the pieces closest to what already exists. Extend the childcare entitlement to cover every parent from nine months. Restart council housebuilding at the scale of the 1960s. Make adult education free again, as it was within living memory. Bring the buses back into public hands and watch fares fall. Each of these is a single decision that a single government could make in a single parliament. The point of having a name for the whole, Universal Basic Services, is that it lets you design the pieces to fit together rather than bolt them on one at a time and have them contradict each other, as British social policy has been for forty years. The destination matters because it changes how you build the road.

Paying for it

Cost is what kills this argument every time, so start there.

The most thorough attempt at a number came from University College London in 2017. Their estimate for a starter package covering housing, transport, food, and adult education was £42 billion a year, about 2.3% of the country’s annual income. Update that figure for inflation, and you’re at roughly £55 to £60 billion today. That is real money. It is also less than the country spends each year on interest payments on its existing debts, and it would deliver services worth more than £150 a week to the poorest households in Britain. Money that those families would no longer have to find from their wages.

Some of UBS pays for itself, in the literal sense that it replaces existing spending on the failure modes. Housing Benefit is propping up landlords. Universal Credit is topping up wages that should be livable on their own without the state subsidising employers who refuse to pay enough. Agency staff are filling NHS rotas at three times the cost of permanent staff, because the training pipeline has never been delivered. The lifetime tax cost of long-term unemployment. The cheapest version of UBS is the one we don’t build, because we already pay for the consequences.

With that said, a bigger share of the money has to come from taxes. And the tax system we have was designed for a more equal country than the one we live in now. Britain is markedly less equal than it was forty years ago, and the tax system has not adjusted. The three changes that follow would correct that. Almost all of the additional money would come from the wealthiest fifth of households.

The cleanest single change is to stop taxing the income people earn from working at a higher rate than the income people make from owning things. If you spend a year working, you pay income tax at 20%, 40% or 45%, plus National Insurance. If you spend the same year sitting on an asset that goes up in value, whether shares or a second home or a stake in a business, and then sell it for a profit, you pay Capital Gains Tax at 18% or 24%, and nothing at all on the first £3,000 of profit. The system actively rewards owning over working, by design.

It is also a remarkably narrow tax. In 2022-23, 348,000 people paid Capital Gains Tax, compared with 34.6 million who paid income tax in the same year. And of all the money raised by CGT, 41% came from individuals who realised gains of £5 million or more in a single year. That is less than 1% of CGT-payers, yet they contribute nearly half of CGT receipts. The arithmetic is straightforward. The framing of CGT as a broad-based tax that ordinary investors should worry about is a political achievement, not a description of reality.

There is no defensible moral reason to tax income from owning at a lower rate than income from working. Aligning the two would raise meaningful money, and almost all of it would come from the very wealthiest households. It would also close the avoidance industry that exists to convert salary into capital gains, which is a real thing high earners do because the law currently allows it.

The second change is to the top of the income tax system. The standard measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, is around 35% today. It was around 26% in the late 1970s. The share of all national income going to the richest 1% roughly doubled between 1970 and 2005, from 7.1% to 14.3%, and it has not come back down. Returning inequality to something like its 1970s level isn’t a fringe demand. It is a return to the pattern that produced the strongest sustained period of post-war prosperity this country has ever had. The top income tax rate in 1979 was 83%. What is being proposed here is historically normal.

The third change, and any UBS programme worth the name has to face it eventually, is land. A land value tax is what it sounds like: a small annual tax on the value of the land a property sits on, separate from the building on top of it. It is the policy that economists across the political spectrum agree is the most efficient way to raise revenue, and the one that politicians will not touch. You can’t move land offshore. You can’t hide it in a trust. It can’t relocate to Dublin to avoid the bill. A country that builds its tax base on things that don’t run away will collect more, and collect it more cheaply, than one that builds it on things that do.

Put the three changes together, and a £55-60 billion UBS programme stops looking expensive. The question isn’t really whether we can afford it. It is whether we keep choosing, year after year, to make the richest fifth of the country richer instead.

Objections worth taking seriously

A few objections come up reliably, and the argument owes each of them an answer.

What if I don’t want the service? UBS bans nothing. It builds a floor; it doesn’t put a ceiling on what people choose to buy on top of it. The well-off will continue to use private healthcare and send their children to private schools, and that is fine. The problem UBS is trying to solve isn’t the existence of a ceiling. It is the absence of a floor.

Then there is quality. The NHS has waiting lists. British Rail had bad sandwiches. State provision isn’t magic, and UBS has to acknowledge that institutional design, getting the services to be reliably good, is the harder half of the work. The answer to bad provision is better provision, not no provision. The current system is not free of bureaucracy; it’s just bureaucracy we have no control over. We can vote out a government managing the NHS badly, but I have little to no power over my local private train company.

What about the incentive to work? UBS is not UBI. You don’t get cash for doing nothing. You get access to services, and to do anything beyond the basics, you still need to earn. If anything, UBS makes work easier. You can take a job because your child has childcare, or move because housing exists, or retrain in your forties because the course is free. It does mean people are less trapped in work they hate to keep a roof over their heads, which, in an age where machines can do more of the work, is closer to the point than the problem. The current benefits system penalises work by sharply withdrawing support as earnings rise. UBS does the opposite.

Who delivers all this? UBS means a larger state: more teachers, more childcare workers, more housing officers, more transport staff. That isn’t a problem; it is part of the answer. The piece started with the question of what happens to people whose jobs are disappearing. The same workers who would otherwise be drawing Universal Credit are the ones we would be training to staff the system. UBS provides services. It also provides the jobs that deliver them. This is somewhat a call for a return to pre-Thatcherite governments that could actually get things done.

And finally, UBI supporters: why not just give people the money and let them decide how best to spend it? Because, as we established earlier, the money gets captured. Cash transfers into constrained markets raise prices, not living standards. UBI is a noble idea designed for an economy that doesn’t exist.

A floor that holds

The underlying claim of this argument isn’t really left-wing or right-wing. It is that the country works better when nobody falls through the bottom: when the redundancy at 47 doesn’t become five years out of work, when a single parent doesn’t have to choose between a job and childcare, when the kid in a town with no buses can still get to college, when the warehouse worker whose job goes to a robot has somewhere obvious to go next.

The NHS proved that this country can do collective provision well when it decides to. The argument for UBS is that we should decide again, for the things that matter as much as health.

The next century will be more disruptive than the last. The shape of work is going to keep changing. The question is whether we keep responding to that with cheques that get captured by landlords and a benefits system that punishes people for the bad luck of being born into the wrong decade, or whether we deliberately build something once that holds.