Conservative group backs universal basic income trial

The Conservative group on Fife Council has confirmed its support for the local authority’s plan to trial universal basic income (UBI).

Council officials are currently developing a business plan that would result in everyone in the pilot area – likely to be Kelty and Cowdenbeath – given an unconditional minimum payment to meet basic needs.

Councillor Dave Dempsey, Tory group leader, said he believed UBI offers the chance to “replace a dog’s breakfast of benefits and other measures with something simple and elegant”, although he stressed it will not be as simple as some suggest.

“It isn’t just a case of chucking extra money at some favoured community,” he said.

“The idea behind UBI is that everyone, from the poorest to the local millionaire, gets the same basic sum from the state.

“What they don’t then get are extra payments through the benefits system. And, because everything has to be paid for, the cost will be taken back in tax, so that the millionaire will be no better and probably a bit worse off at the end of it all.

“Unfortunately, the devil is in the detail. If this was easy, we’d have done it by now.

“There’s the perennial question of how to protect those with a tendency to blow lump sums and then be unable to pay for rent, food or whatever.

“But perhaps the biggest challenge for those working up a UBI trial lies in ring fencing the trial community, whose inhabitants would in theory have a tax and benefit system quite different from those around them.

“Getting the various arms of government singing from the same song sheet will be an achievement.”