PI cannot piggyback off existing welfare conditions.

Atkinson’s first response to our trilemma amounts to denying the scale of the difficulties we identified. His main reason for this lies in the supposition that PI could piggyback on existing welfare administration. For example, Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) currently allows claimants to restrict their hours of work availability due to caring responsibilities. Similarly, certain types of voluntary work allow them to postpone taking up a job offer. PI would thus rely on categorical distinctions that are already familiar and widely used in current social protection schemes. While Atkinson is very alive to the complex and stigmatising administration of means-testing, he appears, in contrast, to believe that eligibility testing for programmes that only require category decisions is relatively straightforward— and would reap the administrative savings of avoiding the more challenging task of means-testing.Atkinson’s first response to our trilemma amounts to denying the scale of the difficulties we identified. His main reason for this lies in the supposition that PI could piggyback on existing welfare administration. For example, Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) currently allows claimants to restrict their hours of work availability due to caring responsibilities. Similarly, certain types of voluntary work allow them to postpone taking up a job offer. PI would thus rely on categorical distinctions that are already familiar and widely used in current social protection schemes. While Atkinson is very alive to the complex and stigmatising administration of means-testing, he appears, in contrast, to believe that eligibility testing for programmes that only require category decisions is relatively straightforward— and would reap the administrative savings of avoiding the more challenging task of means-testing.

However, this ignores the many ways in which current benefit administration already fails—often disastrously so, at least viewed from the perspective of the claimant encountering refusal, delay or sanctions. Consider, for example, the increased manifestation of ‘hidden conditionality’ in the recent reform of disability benefits in the UK, which has a debilitating and stigmatising impact on disabled claimants and in many cases pushes them further into poverty and dependency.8

The processing of social security categories has become subject to a systematic process of ‘risk re-categorisation’, whereby the category of unemployment is broadened because exit routes from unemployment to alternative benefit schemes are closed off and, as a consequence, the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in the population are driven back into more precarious unemployment benefit schemes.9 The most likely effect of using existing, highly problematic, categories and distinctions as a basis for establishing eligibility for a PI would in our view be to further destabilise those categories.

This difficulty is thrown into sharp focus if we consider two recent pernicious developments in social administration. In the UK and elsewhere we are witnessing extensive outsourcing of social administration to for-profit private contractors, who have come to epitomise the pinnacle of the people-processing paradigm—with all attendant problems of error, intrusion and sheer disregard for the rights and freedoms of their ‘clients’. Matters are further exacerbated by governments across Europe buying wholesale into the logic of austerity politics, pitching budget restraint as the core rationale driving policy, including the administration of benefits. The combined effect of both spells little hope in the sort of optimistic approach to bureaucratic politics implied by Atkinson’s advocacy for PI.

There is a final point worth emphasising. Defining a participation requirement around categories embedded in current social administration would alienate those who embrace PI as a more inclusive type of social support and thus fall on the first horn of the dilemma. Specifically, for PI to be of interest to those within the growing basic income community, it has to be the case that the participation requirement is interpreted in a very broad manner. Atkinson writes ‘[t]he criteria would exclude [only] those who devoted their lives to pure leisure’—the famous Malibu surfer in the debate between John Rawls and Philippe Van Parijs.10 But to achieve this would require going well beyond the interpretation of social participation in present day benefit administration. In short, pace Atkinson we insist that a participation requirement—if it is to be effectively achieved within the parameters implied by the PI debate—is more demanding than existing welfare state programmes. To our mind, this means PI is genuinely at risk of implementation failure unless accompanied by major investment in administrative capacity-building.