What is a Citizen's Basic Income?

A Citizen's Basic Income is an unconditional, automatic and nonwithdrawable regular income for each individual legally resident. (A Citizen's Basic Income is sometimes called a Basic Income or a Citizen's Income.)

• • ‘Unconditional’: A Citizen's Basic Income would vary with age, but there would be no other conditions: so everyone of the same age would receive the same Citizen's Basic Income, whatever their gender, employment status, income, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else.

• • ‘Automatic’: Someone's Citizen's Basic Income would be paid weekly or monthly, automatically.

• • ‘Nonwithdrawable’: Citizen's Basic Incomes would not be meanstested. Whether someone's earnings increase, decrease, or stay the same, their Citizen's Basic Income will not change.

• • ‘Individual’: Citizen's Basic Incomes would be paid on an individual basis, and not on the basis of a couple or household.

• • ‘As a right’: Everybody legally resident in the UK would receive a Citizen's Basic Income, subject to a minimum period of legal residency in the UK, and continuing residency for most of the year.

A Citizen's Basic Income scheme would phase out as many allowances against personal income tax as possible, would phase out or reduce many existing means-tested benefits, and would pay a Citizen's Basic Income automatically to every man, woman and child.

The Citizen's Basic Income would

• • create a financial platform on which all would be free to build;

• • encourage individual freedom and responsibility;

• • help to bring about social cohesion;

• • reduce perverse incentives that discourage work and savings;

• • be affordable within current revenue and expenditure constraints;

• • be easy to understand;

• • be cheap to administer and easy to automate;

• • be without work or any other tests;

• • not attract error or fraud;

• • not require bureaucratic interference;

• • not generate stigma;

• • encourage caring and community activity; and

• • be implemented all at once for the entire population, or for particular age cohorts and then extended to the rest of the population.