‘BI’ excludes in-kind payments, one-off grants, means-testing, conditionality, or subsets. Prefer consensus.
Torry ’22 [Malcolm; 2022; general manager of Basic Income Earth Network, visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, renowned expert in the financial feasibility of Basic Income schemes and previously served as director of the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust; “Basic Income and Basic Income Schemes: Definitions and Details,” in Basic Income: What, Why, and How, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14248-2_2]
The definition published by the Citizen's Basic Income Trust reads as follows:
A Citizen's Basic Income is an unconditional, automatic and nonwithdrawable income for each individual as a right of citizenship. (A Citizen's Basic Income (CBI) is sometimes called a Basic Income (BI) or a Citizen's Income (CI))
• 'Unconditional': A CBI would vary with age, but there would be no other conditions: so everyone of the same age would receive the same CBI, whatever their gender, employment status, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else.
• 'Automatic': Someone's CBI would be paid weekly or monthly, automatically.
• 'Nonwithdrawable': CBIs would not be means-tested. Whether someone's earnings or wealth increased, decreased, or stayed the same, their Citizen's Basic Income would not change.
• 'Individual': CBIs would be paid on an individual basis, and not on the basis of a couple or household.
• 'As a right': Everybody legally resident in the UK would receive a CBI, subject to a minimum period of legal residency in the UK, and continuing residency for most of the year (Citizen's Basic Income Trust, 2018).
According to the definition published on the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) website:
A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.
That is, basic income has the following five characteristics:
• Periodic: it is paid at regular intervals (for example every month), not as a one-off grant.
• Cash payment: it is paid in an appropriate medium of exchange, allowing those who receive it to decide what they spend it on. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use.
• Individual: it is paid on an individual basis—and not, for instance, to households.
• Universal: it is paid to all, without means test.
• Unconditional: it is paid without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness-to-work. (BIEN, 2022)
The different definitions exhibit different emphases, but they are perfectly consistent with each other, and they represent a consensus—and, after all, consensus is what definitions are about.