The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the lack of flexibility and sufficiency of the welfare state as it stands. In this essay, I will discuss a potential solution for the long term to tackle inequality and increase growth.

The welfare state in the UK is ill-equipped to provide people with access to opportunity and basic services at the best of times, let alone at a time of severe economic turmoil. A crisis in public health, housing and an economic collapse are damaging enough isolated. When they occur concurrently, they impact every aspect of a nation: health, productivity, standard of life and mental wellbeing.

The consensus is that the system desperately needs reform. However, that apparent conclusion clouds the reality of discourse over what form that change would take. A policy that is beginning to take centre stage of this fierce debate is a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. Prior to the pandemic, a poll of EU countries (including the UK at the time) conducted by Dalia Research found that in a hypothetical referendum 68% of respondents would support the implementation of a UBI. Covid-19 will have only ingrained the desire for such an improvement to the welfare state.

When attending a lecture at the LSE last year, I asked the Yale Emeritus Professor of Economics and Nobel prize-winner Robert Shiller about the potential for such a proposal. He tied the motive to the grain dividend in ancient Rome. He stated at the time that ‘one day it (UBI) may be necessary’. I would be interested to hear his opinion today on whether this innovative policy’s time had in fact come.

The renowned Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek once said ‘the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the great society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born’ summarises the need for such an guaranteed income. As we reflect on the exposed flaws of the status quo, we would do well to give this perspective some further thought.