As the Welsh Government begin their Universal Basic Income trials, here’s how it can help the mental health of young people
From cover of RSA report
We remain convinced at the Alternative Global that Universal Basic Income, or a guaranteed citizen payment, is an investment in citizenship and agency which repays many dividends for society. And at a time when the standard business and social model is in crisis, it will become even more salient.
Here's an important new body of research, from the RSA - investigating how UBI might improve youth mental health. It’s riding on the beginning of a UBI trial from the Welsh Government which began in July.
The executive summary below gives you pointers into the work:
There is a crisis in mental health among young people. Between 1995 and 2014, the proportion of 16-24-year-olds in England reporting a longstanding mental health condition increased from 0.6 percent to 5.9 percent. Reported rates of self-harm (5.3 percent to 13.7 percent) and attempted suicide (1.3 percent to 2.2 percent) also increased from 2000 to 2014 among 16-24s in the same surveys.
The consequences are a generation of young people affected by potentially avoidable forms of mental health problems while healthcare and public services become stretched to the point of breaking. In England alone, there were 420,314 open referrals to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in February 2022, a 54 percent increase since the same month in 2020. The trends are similar in Wales and Scotland and there is no sign of the crisis abating.
While reactive policy has often focused on improving coping strategies and increasing the efficiency of services, interest is growing in addressing the social causes of anxiety and depression. A large body of evidence indicates that those conditions are strongly affected by social determinants: income, wealth, education, social capital and opportunity.
Given the government’s prevention agenda, policymakers are increasingly examining the role of cash interventions to avoid illness in the first place. While some GPs have called for cash prescriptions, a range of organisations, health bodies, community groups and politicians have called for trials of Universal Basic Income: a largely unconditional, regular payment to all adult permanent residents to support people’s basic needs.
Some of the authors of this report have presented a theoretical model of impact of UBI (see Figure 1) that suggests that schemes which provide regular, uninterrupted access to cash support have the capacity to improve outcomes by reducing poverty, stress and health diminishing behaviour.
Figure 1
In 2021, as part of a refreshed version of the Programme for Government incorporating the Co-operation Agreement with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh administration pledged to ‘pilot an approach to Basic Income’.. Initiated on 1 July 2022, the trial will last three years and involve 500 care leavers, all of whom will receive an unconditional (pre-tax) payment of £1,600 per month for a duration of 24 months.
While this is not a universal form of Basic Income, and while it replaces things like housing benefit that we propose may be best left in place at least initially, there is no denying the significance of this trial. It is the first announcement of its kind in the UK and will be one of the most generous Basic Income schemes trialled anywhere in the world.
Its results will help shape the UK debate on unconditional regular payments – in particular, the impact of regular payments on disadvantaged young people as they navigate an important transition period in their lives and move toward greater financial and social independence.
Care leavers frequently encounter serious difficulty when leaving care. A 2022 Ofsted survey in England found that only around half (54 percent) said they felt safe always or most of the time with the most common reason for not feeling safe being issues relating to money (49 percent). Further, a third (32 percent) did not have enough money for hobbies and leisure activities.
At the very least, the scheme in Wales will provide care leavers with a stable financial basis from which they can start to address other issues in their lives. We believe that the same benefits of this trial – financial security offering a safety net that reduces one element of uncertainty in life – would also apply in a whole population trial.
Our research suggests that young people transitioning to independence would particularly benefit from this. For this reason, we hope that if the Wales trial produces the positive results we expect, the government not only continues the scheme for care leavers, but also introduces a population-level, town or region-based pilot to assess UBI impacts more generally.
The pilot is a groundbreaking piece of policymaking that offers potential for the clearest reform to the welfare system since the period following the Second World War. The trial coincides with our Wellcome Trust project: Assessing the prospective impacts of Universal Basic Income on anxiety and depression among 14-24-year-olds. This interim report sets out key findings that support the Welsh government’s decision to trial the policy and identifies specific areas in which the trial is likely to be impactful.
Findings
Recommendations
These are merely headline findings and recommendations - the body of the material is in the report (holding page here, and PDF here). But it’s exciting to have another angle from which to advocate for UBI.