Universal Basic Services fail – they are not universal, they stigmatize the poor, and they encourage food waste.

Free ‘universal basic services’ has recently been advocated as a better alternative to a basic income, on the grounds that it would be a cheaper and more cost-effective way of combatting poverty. On the premise that ‘essential services should be free at the point of need’, paralleling the National Health Service and state education, proponents have identified universal free ‘basic’ housing, free food, free local transport, free TV licence and a free ‘basic’ communications package including mobile phone and broadband internet. All of this, they claim, would cost £42 billion or about 2.3% of GDP. We should be united in wanting more and better public services. But improving public services is not in opposition to providing a basic income. They would fulfil different needs and purposes. However, the proposals for ‘universal basic services’ (UBS) are not what they seem at first sight. For a start, what is being proposed is not ‘universal’ in any accepted use of the word. For instance, the provision of ‘free food’ under the UBS banner is deceptive. According to the UBS scheme, the state would provide "one-third of the meals for the 2.2 million households deemed to experience food insecurity each year". That is not universal. It is targeted. Identifying those suffering from food insecurity would necessarily imply means-testing or some complex test of ‘food insecurity’. As with all targeted schemes, many of those eligible would not be reached, while those receiving the free food would, as a result, face an even greater poverty trap and accompanying precarity trap than exist in the British welfare state today. The Department for Work and Pensions itself estimates that going from means-tested benefits into the sort of low-paid job claimants could obtain results in only a 20% increase in net income – a poverty trap of 80%. If they also lost ‘free food’, the net gain would be even less. The proposal would also generate a new moral hazard. Someone deemed food insecure, and thus entitled to free meals, would have a disincentive to become food secure, unless the free food on offer was lousy (which could hardly be a policy objective, even though it is likely to be a policy outcome). That moral hazard would be accompanied by an equally perverse immoral hazard, since some people would have an incentive to become food insecure deliberately in order to claim free meals. Providing ‘the poor’ with free food would extend the charity state and institutionalise the obnoxious system of ‘food banks’, which have mushroomed in the austerity era. The mass provision of free food would also risk more waste of food. However well-intentioned the charity state might be, people receiving free goods tend to value them less and treat them with less care than if they pay for them. In practice, the choice of what food to make free would be arbitrary, based on paternalistic views of what is good for ‘the poor’ and what is not. Those countries that have implemented highly subsidised food have not had great success with it. And there is the likely effect of stigmatisation of food support claimants, as has been the case in the USA with food stamps. Many are so ashamed to show their poverty that they forego their entitlement.