Dr. Fiona Dukelow:

These are all great questions. I will address the one on lone parents and anomalies first. Dr. Whelan and I first became aware of this when doing a project last year that looked at the jobseeker's transitional payment. We did some qualitative research, interviewing lone parents who had experience of the payment. Some of them had moved from the one parent family payment on to the jobseeker's transitional payment. The parents we spoke to identified two key issues related to the degree to which the jobseeker's transitional payment actually enables work, which is part of its design. The first issue was the fact that when a person is on the one parent family payment, they are entitled to the working family payment. However, when a person transfers to the jobseeker's transitional payment, they are no longer entitled to it. If a person was working and continuing on the same work, they experience a drop in income when they make the transition from one payment to the other. That seems very unfair to the people we spoke to. It seemed to be at cross-purposes with the objectives of the jobseeker's transitional payment.

The other issue does not affect as many people. This is the self-employed income that is not treated in the same way as PAYE income for people on the jobseeker's transitional payment. For example, one woman felt she had to give up her work when she moved on to the payment because it was not worth her while to continue in her self-employed occupation. This came as a huge shock to her. She spoke about sinking into depression and falling behind with her bills. It has quite a strong impact at individual human level. It does not affect a large group of people every year - only some 200 people - but it has a deep effect on those. This seems to be an anomaly that could be addressed. The fact that it is regarded as an income for the income disregard when a person is on the one parent family payment does not seem to make sense.

There is a growing debate on the idea of participation income. There has been a lot of research and debate on universal basic income and the idea has been around for a very long time. As an idea, participation income has a shorter history. It is associated with the proposal made by an economist based in the UK, Professor Tony Atkinson, who is now deceased. With this idea, he tried to make a case for a type of payment that would value participation, not necessarily paid work. It might or might not be means tested and would be like a halfway house between a means-tested system and universal basic income. He saw it lying side by side with pensions, either universal or contributory, and other social insurance payments. It can be means tested but it does not have to be. In some proposals it is not means tested at all. In other proposals, and in reality where there have been experiments with it, there is still some degree of means testing. However, this would not be necessarily as stringent as that on typical social assistance payments. Participation income allows people the choice and autonomy to engage in types of work that are not necessarily paid work but work they can do alongside paid work if they want to. With this, the rules around how many hours a person spends in paid work are lifted. It does require a contribution in caring, community work or some kind of voluntary work. It is not that dissimilar to community employment in terms of the type of work that people might do on a participation income scheme.

There are partial examples of in various countries. The Netherlands has used it in its Participation Act. It has not been done wholesale, but rather in some municipalities which have experimented locally. Participation experiments have been co-designed with welfare claimants themselves. A key element of it is that participation is about empowering a person to engage in the type of work that is meaningful to them.

It might be caring work, which it is in many cases. It might be voluntary work in the community, environmental work, co-operative work, food production, work in community gardens or lots of other things. The idea is that there a reciprocity in that people are doing something in return for their payment. They are treated as autonomous people and left alone to get on with what they want to do. In that respect, it is different from universal basic income, where there are no conditions. People are just let off and have complete freedom regarding what they do. There are no conditions attached to the payment and it is not means tested.