Participation income is really, really hard to administer.

Twenty years ago, Tony Atkinson suggested that because ‘it will be difficult to secure political support for a Citizen’s Income while it remains unconditional on labour market or other activity’, a compromise might be required. He thought that political support would be easier to achieve if receipt of an otherwise unconditional and nonwithdrawable income were to be conditional on some kind of participation in society.Footnote15 As Tony Fitzpatrick has put it: such a ‘Participation Income’ would require participation in society, which might be more acceptable to the public and to policymakers than an income that simply invited it.Footnote16

The ‘Participation Income’ would be given to people who were ill, disabled, retired, or looking for work, without their having to ‘participate’ in any other way, but otherwise at least one of a number of participation conditions would need to be met. Employment, self-employment, education, training, voluntary work, and caring for the young, older people, or disabled dependents would all count as participation in society.

What neither Atkinson nor Fitzpatrick factor in is the difficulty of administering a Participation Income. (It is not uncommon for academics to ignore administrative implications. It is less common for those of us who have spent time administering social security benefits to do so.) A casework approach would be required to administer the participation conditions, which would hand to junior civil servants—‘street-level bureaucrats’Footnote17—the kind of discretion that has made claiming means-tested benefits such a demeaning process for both claimants and administrators. Decisions would need to be made about precisely which activities should count as participation in society; and for anyone not employed or retired, mechanisms would need to be constructed to decide whether they were ‘participating’. (How much self-employment would count? How much voluntary activity? Caring for whom? How much disability would exempt someone from satisfying a participation condition? etc.) Minimal voluntary activities would no doubt be artificially created to enable people to satisfy a participation condition, and administrators would develop their own criteria to enable them to grant the Participation Income wherever possible. Such ‘creative compliance’Footnote18 would quickly undermine any initial public approval based on the idea that the Participation Income should only be paid to people genuinely participating in society. The initial participation conditions would exclude very few citizens, because most people do participate in society in some way or other; and creative compliance would ensure that only a very small number of individuals would not receive the Participation Income. Massive administrative effort would be expended on administering a benefit very like a Citizen’s Income, but the difficulties associated with administering the conditions would quickly sour public attitudes. Either the conditions would be quickly abandoned and a Citizen’s Income established, or the soured debate would cause the whole plan to be abandoned. It is difficult to predict which would occur.

De Wispelaere and Stirton suggest that ‘Participation Income might not be such a great idea after all’, because the administrative requirements would be so onerous. Hermione Parker’s particularly interesting verdict was that ‘a major public education exercise is necessary before voters are likely to adjust their value systems to the problems of post-industrial societies. Fudging the issues could delay this process.’Footnote19