Every transfer system embeds, in its design, an assumption about the people it serves. The assumption is rarely stated explicitly. It is expressed through the mechanism: the means test, the compliance condition, the documentation requirement, the periodic reassessment.
These features are not neutral administrative choices. They are the operational form of a prior judgement about whether the people the system serves can be trusted to use support in ways the system would approve of, and whether that approval needs to be obtained before the support is provided or maintained while it is being received.
The judgement is not always wrong in its application to specific cases. Some claims are overstated. Some recipients use support in ways the system did not intend. These are real phenomena, though their scale is consistently overstated in political discourse, and the administrative cost of the oversight designed to address them appears, in most jurisdictions where the comparison has been made, to approach or exceed the cost of the phenomena themselves. The judgement is wrong not in its assessment of some individuals but in its application to all of them. The compliance condition falls on the overwhelming majority for whom the distrust it embodies is not warranted, because the system cannot afford the individuated assessment that would distinguish the warranted from the unwarranted at scale.
The alternative is not the absence of any assumption. It is a different starting assumption—that the people who need support can generally be trusted to use it in ways that serve their own interests, and that their interests, adequately supported, are broadly compatible with the interests of the community that provides the support. This is the assumption that underlies Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services, and it produces a fundamentally different institutional logic from the one the current settlement is built on.
Universal Basic Income, in its simplest form, provides every citizen with a regular unconditional payment, set at a level sufficient to meet basic needs, without means testing, without compliance conditions, and without the documentation requirements that the conditioned payment imposes. The payment requires only the fact of citizenship. It does not require the demonstration of need, the performance of approved activities, or the submission to periodic reassessment of eligibility. The compliance apparatus that consumes a significant proportion of both the system’s administrative resources and the recipient’s time and energy is absent, because the payment’s universality makes it unnecessary.
The argument against UBI most frequently encountered in policy debate concerns cost: providing a meaningful payment to everyone, including people who do not need it, would require significant public expenditure that could otherwise be directed toward targeted provision for those who do need it. This is a substantive concern. It is also a concern that is more complex than it appears when stated simply, because the current targeted system carries significant administrative costs that the cost comparison does not always include. The assessment infrastructure, the compliance monitoring, the appeals systems, the legal challenges to incorrect decisions, the healthcare costs of people whose conditions deteriorate under compliance pressure, the documented cases where automated debt collection has produced outcomes requiring subsequent remediation—these are not in the payment line of the budget. They are distributed across multiple departments and agencies. The total cost of targeting, when assembled from these distributed sources, is not routinely compared with the cost of universality.
The empirical evidence from UBI pilots that have been conducted across multiple contexts—Finland, Kenya, Stockton in California, several Canadian provinces—does not consistently support the concern that unconditional income reduces labour force participation in harmful ways. The Finnish pilot produced small but consistent improvements in wellbeing, mental health, and sense of life control among recipients, with no significant reduction in employment. The Stockton pilot found that full-time employment among recipients increased relative to the control group. The Kenyan GiveDirectly programme found that unconditional cash transfers produced sustained improvements in earnings, assets, food security, and psychological wellbeing measured years after the initial transfer. These are not universal results, and the contexts differ enough that generalisation requires caution. What the pilots consistently fail to produce is the dependency spiral that the distrust assumption predicts.
Universal Basic Services takes a different approach to the same underlying question. Rather than providing unconditional income and leaving allocation to the recipient, it provides unconditional access to the services that constitute the baseline conditions for faring well: healthcare, education, housing, transport, digital access, legal representation, democratic participation. The provision is universal—not means-tested, not compliance-conditioned—and it is delivered in kind rather than cash, which addresses some concerns about cash transfers while producing different questions about who designs the services and how responsive they are to the people who use them.
The politically significant feature of genuinely universal services—as distinct from targeted services that are rhetorically described as universal—is that they produce a different political constituency for their maintenance. When a service is targeted at the poor, the people with the most political influence have an interest only in its cost, not its quality. When a service is genuinely universal, the people with the most political influence use it themselves, and their interest in its quality becomes a force for its maintenance. The National Health Service in the United Kingdom retained broad political support for decades partly because it served the full population, and the political cost of its degradation fell on everyone who used it. The targeted services that replaced elements of universalism have been more readily degraded, because their political constituency is narrower and less powerful.
This is not an argument that universal services are always preferable to targeted ones across all dimensions. Universality has genuine costs, and some forms of need require more intensive provision than universal service can provide. The observation is more limited: that the institutional logic of a universal service tends to produce different incentive structures for its maintenance than the institutional logic of a targeted one, and that this difference has consequences for quality and durability that the cost comparison between the two approaches does not capture.
The co-design principle addresses a dimension that neither UBI nor UBS directly resolves: the relationship between the people who design welfare systems and the people who use them. Most welfare systems are designed by people who are not in the circumstances the systems are designed for, implemented by institutions with their own operational interests, and evaluated against criteria that the designers chose. The knowledge that comes from direct experience of the circumstances—what actually makes a difference, what creates additional burden, what the system produces from the inside that is invisible from the outside—is not systematically included in the design process.
Co-design changes this relationship by treating people with lived experience of a need as an essential source of knowledge about what addressing that need requires. This is not a new idea, and its implementation has varied considerably in quality and genuine influence. The version that produces genuine change is the version in which lived experience is treated as equivalent in authority to professional expertise, not as a supplement to it—where the person who has navigated the welfare system for years is regarded as knowing things about its operation that the policy designer does not know and cannot learn from the data the system generates about itself.
The Maori-led welfare reforms in New Zealand from the 2010s onward provide one example of what this can look like in practice. Whānau Ora—a programme that provides funding directly to Maori families and whānau collectives to allocate according to their own assessment of their needs—shifted the institutional logic from professional assessment of individual need to collective self-determination of what the community required. The programme’s outcomes have been contested and its implementation has been uneven, but its underlying premise—that the people with the most direct knowledge of the circumstances are the appropriate agents for designing the response to them—produced a measurably different institutional arrangement from the standard welfare service model.
The Participatory City programme in Barking and Dagenham operated on a related principle: rather than designing services for residents and offering them for uptake, it created infrastructure that residents could use to design and run activities for each other. The professional service was repositioned as support for community-led activity rather than as the primary provider of prescribed interventions. The distinction matters because it changes the direction of accountability: the community-designed activity is accountable to the community rather than to the funder’s outcome metrics.
The trust assumption that underlies these alternatives is not naive. It does not require the belief that unconditional support will produce perfect outcomes in all cases, or that communities will always design services that serve their members effectively, or that the removal of compliance conditions will eliminate misuse. It requires only the observation that the distrust assumption currently embedded in the visible transfer system appears to be producing worse outcomes on most measurable dimensions than the alternatives, while generating administrative costs and citizenship effects that are not included in the argument for its continuation.
The current settlement seems calibrated toward managing the political risk of appearing insufficiently rigorous rather than toward producing the welfare of the people the system serves. This is a historically specific institutional logic, not a natural feature of welfare provision. It became the dominant logic through a set of incentive pressures—the political reward for visible oversight, the penalty for the appearance of laxness—that are real and that have consistently shaped policy in the direction they reward. Understanding the mechanism does not resolve it. But it clarifies that the current settlement is a choice, made within specific incentive constraints, rather than an inevitable expression of how public resource transfer must work.
The starting assumption can be changed.
Systems built from the alternative assumption have been tried.
The observable outcomes, across multiple trials and with important contextual variation, have repeatedly moved in directions the distrust model does not strongly predict.
Not universally better.
Not without complication.
But better, with sufficient consistency, that the persistence of the distrust assumption requires more explanation than it currently receives in mainstream policy debate.
The explanation appears, at least in part, to lie less in evidentiary superiority than in the political incentives that shaped which assumptions became administratively normal.
The Vorpel Foundation