Free cash plan for jobless doesn’t work

A TRIAL scheme to give jobless people in Finland a ‘minimum income’ of €560 a month has flopped after it failed to encourage them to find work.

The scheme, launched in 2017, was supposed to push people to start new businesses.

Monthly payments of €560 from the programme were intended to reassure 2,000 unemployed people that they would have an income no matter how their ventures did.

But the scheme failed to create jobs as the Scandinavian country had hoped.

Ohto Kanninen, from Finland’s Labour Institute for Economic Research, said: ‘The recipients of a basic income were no better... at finding employment in the open labour market.’

Reacting to the study, the Finnish government said it had no plans to expand the pilot scheme but would study the results.