If You Want To End Homelessness, Give People A Home

September 26, 2025September 30, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.”
– Jeanette Winterson

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Image Source: M J Richardson, CC-BY-SA. The Social Bite Village in Granton, Edinburgh

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between ‘good’ policies and ‘easy’ policies. There are some ideas out there that politicians find very easy to do, regardless of whether they are good or bad. And some that politicians find very hard to do no matter how much good they’d do.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an excellent example of this. As a paper exercise, it looks fairly straightforward. Just find out where everyone is, identify a means of paying everyone and then just pay everyone a certain amount of money regardless of whether they ‘need’ it or not.

It has been shown dozens of times now that these kinds of unconditional cash payments work. They reduce all of the negative markers of poverty, they do it more effectively than ‘means tested’ alternatives, and they do so so effectively that several recent pilots have found that the money granted in the UBI was less than the cost of ‘fixing’ the poverty caused by not having a UBI.

This is a massively ‘good’ policy but it’s not an ‘easy’ one. The challenges of unwinding the existing welfare system – and all of its deliberately punitive negatives – is extremely difficult in the sense that if you happen to miss a month between someone’s last Universal Credit payment and their first UBI payment, then that person could suffer extreme hardship.

It’s hard in the sense of identifying everyone who should be paid and how to pay them – including people who don’t have bank accounts or stable addresses or who may have their finances constrained for any number of reasons. It’s also hard in the political sense that the first reaction from too many who would reach to oppose a UBI is “Why should they get something for nothing?”.

There’s another policy that is pretty much objectively proven now to result in overwhelming positive outcomes, has been shown to be cheaper than not doing it, and will almost certainly get that same final question in response to it – Housing First.

The principle of Housing First is that everyone, regardless of means or circumstance, should have a roof over their head. If someone finds themselves homeless, then this principle means that you don’t wait until support services have deemed whether or not they are worthy of support.

You don’t have the person jump through all kinds of paperwork to prove they need that support. You don’t make judgements on whether or not their lifestyle meets some kind of moral minimum before granting them support. Instead, the first thing you do is provide that person with a house that they can live in for as long as they want at no cost.

You can see the objection immediately. “I pay my rent/mortgage! I didn’t get my house for free!”. Well, I didn’t either, and nor have I had the misfortune of having to sleep rough but I know people who have and I’m well aware that any of us are only one bad day away from having it happen to us.

An excellent paper was published last week by the English think tank the Social Market Foundation that reviews Housing First pilot schemes in Scotland, England, Finland and Canada as part of a campaign to roll Housing First out to all rough sleepers in England and to, in effect, end homelessness.

“In Scotland, it was found that giving someone a ‘free’ house was about £10,000 per person, per year cheaper than just leaving them to sleep on the streets.”

The details of the schemes differ slightly – mostly in whether the house granted to the person is part of a ‘homeless village’ or whether the houses are embedded within communities, but all share the principle that a house is not a reward for taking part in the scheme nor are moral judgements around sobriety or substance use either a barrier to entering the scheme or a cause for eviction. In the words of the Finnish study “dwelling is the foundation on which the rest of life is put back together”.

The Scottish examples orbit around the Pathfinder programme that ran from 2019-2022 and found that while the average cost per participant in the programme was around £13,350 per year, the average cost of homelessness was estimated to be about £23,000 per person, per year. In other words, giving someone a ‘free’ house was about £10,000 per person, per year cheaper than just leaving them to sleep on the streets.

Similar levels of savings were found in the Finnish example (€15,000/£12,770 per person per year) and in the Canadian example ($CAD 4,850/£2,611 per person, per year). The SMF estimate that if Housing First was rolled out to as many rough sleepers as is currently possible (i.e. all those who aren’t barred from accessing public funds) then around 9,300 people would avoid sleeping rough and the public purse would save around £178 million.

On that subject of people who have no recourse to public funding, they do advocate that this should change. In all the current rancour about migration right now, you might have failed to spot a very obvious flaw in the current system for supporting asylum seekers. In the UK, asylum seekers – those who have claimed asylum from political repression or other forms of discrimination – are barred from working, are barred from many forms of housing and often don’t have their own funds to fall back on.

They are provided meagre housing by the state (getting a room, basic food and a £10 a week is not the High Living that those stoking xenophobia in Britain right now claim it is. If anyone wishes to dispute this point, I challenge them to live for six months on only the means provided to an asylum seeker and write a report of their experiences.)

But they are often turned out of that housing the moment their asylum claim is deemed legitimate and they become political refugees. Without work up till that point, with few support networks around them and without any other fall back plan – it’s no wonder that so many new refugees in Britain end up spending that first night of freedom – or an extended period afterwards – sleeping rough.

Outcomes for those passing through Housing First programmes have almost without exception delivered better outcomes for participants than the services available to them before they entered the programme. In the Scottish programme, more than 80% of participants were still in housing after two years. Not a single participant was evicted from the programme.

In the English pilot schemes, not one participant who left the programme ended up sleeping rough again within the first year. In all of the studies, the mental and physical health of participants improved, they were less likely to commit a crime and less likely to be the victims of a crime.

There appears to be almost no downside of a policy like Housing First and yet I still describe it as politically hard to do largely because of the political cost rather than the financial, moral and social cost of homelessness. This needs to be tackled head on. If it produces better outcomes than existing policies and is cheaper than those policies then it becomes a moral imperative to do that hard thing.

Scotland can end homelessness, end the negative stigma around people who lose the roof over their head, can increase social cohesion and heal some of the divides between us and can do it while saving money. All we need to do to make this happen is to give a homeless person a free house.

What Scottish Independence Could Deliver For The Welfare State

July 6, 2025July 7, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.” – Marcus Aurelius

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Back in the early days of Common Weal, while we were still finding our feet and building our reputation, we had an informal rule when it came to policy-making. We had to be able to show the policy working somewhere else.

This was because we felt that Scotland simply wasn’t ready for some of the radical ideas that we wanted to implement so being able to show it already working was a good way of building confidence in a nation too often told “we cannae dae it” (by which our opponents often mean “we shouldnae dae it” which is a different thing entirely).

We’ve since dispensed with that rule and we sometimes broke it even then (one of Common Weal’s very first policy papers, “In Place Of Anxiety”, was an advocacy for Universal Basic Income (UBI) long before it became one of the “cool” policies) but this isn’t to say that we can’t learn lessons from elsewhere.

Just this week, I was asked by a researcher which of our neighbour nations I’d like Scotland to copy if I could. My answer was that we shouldn’t copy any one but that I take a lot of inspiration from Germany on local democracy, from Denmark on energy strategy and from Norway for public ownership. Somewhere else we could do with taking inspiration from our neighbours is on social security.

The scenes this week from the UK’s attempts to hammer the poor and disabled and only backing down after shambolic chaos in the Parliament should be a lesson not just in humanity but in policy-making as well. Never fight a battle you haven’t won in advance. Never assume a large on-paper majority means certain absolute power.

With many of our neighbours basing their politics on proportional representation and coalition politics, this kind of legislation would have undergone a lot of negotiation and compromise long before arriving at the voting chamber.

The way that many of our neighbours deal with the issue of social security is markedly different from the UK in several ways. The first is that the systems are a lot more generous in general. Norway, Denmark and Sweden rank in the top three OECD nations for spending on disability protections at above 3% of GDP while the UK is well below the OECD average at less than 2%.

Many more social securities like unemployment protections follow a different model from the UK when they are calculated. In particular, instead of the flat rate paid under the UK’s Universal Credit, many countries follow a model where the protection you receive is based on a percentage of your previous income.

There are consequences to each of these models. A flat rate tends to be more redistributive if it is generous enough (which Universal Credit isn’t) whereas a proportional rate tends to be less disruptive to an individual who is already going through the shock of losing their job while still having bills to pay.

We’ve seen these impacts in the UK too. During the pandemic, the Covid furlough scheme was paid at a proportional rate to people who were employed but was often paid at a flat Universal Credit rate to self-employed people. This exposed a lot of people who were previously on the side of denigrating poor and vulnerable people as lazy slackers to just how meagre and cruel the UK “benefits” system is.

We had an opportunity then to get some serious change off the back of that and maybe we still see echoes of it in this week’s chaos but largely the Powers That Be wanted to make us forget that moment of reflection as quickly as possible.

On the other side and as tempting as it might be to copy a European-style unemployment insurance based on previous income, and as beneficial that would be to people in well-paid but otherwise insecure jobs, we have to remember that many people are not in well-paid jobs and that wage suppression has been rife in the UK for decades. Receiving 60% of your previous income when you were being paid poverty wages won’t protect you from poverty in unemployment.

So maybe rather than Scotland – particularly an independent Scotland – copying existing social security policies from our neighbours, we need to look to them for inspiration in another way and look back at that paper I mentioned at the start of this column.

Last year, the EU think tank the Coppieters Foundation published a paper called “A European Universal Basic Income” which found that a UBI sufficient to eradicate poverty across the entire union could be entirely paid for by relatively modest changes to income tax and the savings found from the reduction of poverty itself.

Its model called for a UBI of €6,857 per year for adults and half that for children under 14. This is the equivalent of £113 per week for adults and £57 per week for children. The paper claimed that the increase in income taxes to pay for this level of UBI would themselves be relatively modest and the “breakeven” point for people who’d pay more income tax than they’d receive in UBI would be at around the 80th percentile.

In other words, eight out of 10 people would be directly better off with the UBI. And, to repeat, while this is still a relatively small sum per person if you have no other income, it would be enough to eradicate poverty across the entire EU and would be cheaper overall – after the health, crime and social inequality costs of poverty are factored in – than the current systems.

When this paper came out I argued that this meant a UBI was now a moral imperative because it was cheaper than the cost of poverty, but there’s clearly a financial imperative too. Whether we’re discussing an independent Scotland seeking to create a better country for all of us or even just a cynical UK trying to save money in the face of a humiliating attempt to crush the poor, here is a solution we should all support. Eradicate poverty, save money, implement a Universal Basic Income.

Work To Live

April 18, 2025April 21, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“[W]hen your politics no longer have room for empathy, things spin into an amoral chaos. Not only the desperate suffer. Who gets hurt and who stays safe becomes hard to predict.” – Luis Alberto Urrea

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A new German study into Universal Basic Income publishes its final report, showing once again why UBI is a moral imperative. To illustrate those results we could imagine a world where we already have a UBI, but someone wants to study the effect of taking it away and creating the world we live in right now.

In 2021, 122 volunteers had their Universal Basic Income withdrawn from them in pilot project to study the impact of forcing people to work to earn enough money to survive. The participants in the “Work to Live” (WtL) programme were followed for three years alongside 1,580 people who retained their Universal Basic Income of €1,200 per month, regardless of their circumstances, spending intentions or any income they earned on top of their UBI. In 2025, the project published its final report.

Proponents of the “Work to Live” scheme claimed that inducing the fear of starvation, destitution and homelessness in workers would have multiple positive impacts on economic growth including increased work productivity and an increase in the number of hours worked as those without a UBI would be motivated to ensure that they could afford to keep a roof over their head. They also claimed that removing the UBI would increase people’s freedom to choose how to live their lives, without government oversight.

Now, finally, after three years of study, we have some evidence around those claims.

Jobs

Perhaps the most cited claim of “Work to Live” proponents is the idea that UBI makes workers lazy and idle – happy to coast along in their job knowing that they don’t need to earn enough to pay their bills or, in some circumstance, are content to sit completely idle on their sofa existing entirely on their UBI. The study found some surprising results in this regard. The group who had their UBI withdrawn worked essentially the same number of hours as the control group – both working an average of 40 hours a week – but the WtL group reported a substantial decrease in job satisfaction compared to the control. Satisfaction with the income they did receive also dropped markedly with the largest drop coming shortly after the withdrawal of their Basic Income and the gap only marginally closing again as they adapted to their new income levels.

While WtL proponents claimed that the motivational impact of taking away €1,200 a month would spur people to move out of their dead-end jobs or to try to improve their situation through education and training, the opposite was found to be true with the WtL group less likely to change their job and more likely to drop out of education to seek work. Satisfaction within work also dropped for the WtL group, both for those who did seek different employment and for those who stayed where they were at the start of the study.

Autonomy and Self-Determination

“Freedom” is at the heart of the Work to Live campaign, giving people the choice of how to live their life by choosing how to maintain that lifestyle. Those too poor to live a certain way have the freedom to seek those means or to choose to give up those dreams and live within more modest means.

The Work to Live study again confounded those expectations by noting a significant decrease in perceived autonomy compared to the group who retained their Universal Basic Income, with women in particular feeling more constrained by their life without a Basic Income than men. Paradoxically, participants reported that they felt like they had less “free time” in the day after losing their UBI, despite working similar hours to the control group. WfL participants spent notably less time doing non-productive activities outside work such as “volunteering”, “visiting friends” and “sleeping” with an average WtL participant sleeping on average 75 minutes less per week than a control group peer who retained their UBI – despite not spending that extra time in productive work.

Wellbeing

Work to Live advocates often claim that earning money rather than getting it “for free” would increase the sense of satisfaction of holding it and that this would translate into greater life satisfactions as one could look around at the lifestyle bought with that earned money rather than gained via a “handout”.

The pilot programme found once again that these expectations were not backed up by the lived experience of the participants. Life satisfaction dropped markedly shortly after the withdrawal of the UBI and remained more-or-less static in the three years after. This pattern was shared across other satisfaction metrics such as satisfaction with social interactions, the quality of sleep and satisfaction with the money participants had (even when controlled for the total amount of income). Overall stress levels – stress being a significant causative factor in many chronic health conditions – was higher in WtL participants than in the control group.

Finances

The philosophy of Work to Live teaches that money is a precious commodity and must be used wisely. Proponents have claimed that UBI encourages wasteful spending. The study found instead that withdrawal of UBI caused participants to cut their spending on a wide variety of items, including those vital to living comfortably. The largest cut came to vacations, with WtL participants spending almost 60% less on holidays than their UBI peers despite having the same amount of time off work. They also cut spending on clothing by 25%, 5% on everyday needs like food and 2% less on electricity and heating.

Unexpected Effects

Not all of the assumptions about the Work to Live pilot were borne out and some results were completely unexpected. One of the claims against UBI is that as it is an inherently Socialist idea (despite some Libertarian proponents) and thus those who receive a UBI are highly motivated to vote for left-leaning political parties. The study found that WtL participants did not substantially change their voting intention between parties but were less likely to vote at all whether for their preferred party or another.

Work to Live proponents claimed that UBI would make people inherently lazy, but the study found that, in fact, WtL participants were more likely to procrastinate on tasks or to avoid doing them entirely (perhaps in the hope that a problem they were anxious about would “go away”) though there was little change either way on individual propensities to do a task ahead of a deadline or at the last minute once it was decided that the task could not be avoided.

Finally, the sense of basic risk taking amongst participants was largely unchanged with the exception that WtL participants were less likely to risk changing their current job to take on another, despite the opportunity of potentially achieving higher pay or better conditions.

Conclusion

The Work to Live pilot programme has joined other similar studies in showing that attempting to coerce workers into productivity through the threat of destitution leads to more stress, more anxiety and lower rates of public, social and democratic participation and fails to achieve its goal of leading to more hours worked. It is recommended that participants have their Universal Basic Income restored and that other nations who have not yet implemented a UBI scheme of their own join the rest of the civilised world by doing so as soon as practicable.

And Finally

If you’ll allow me to drop the kayfabe at the end of this piece. This new German study into the impacts of Universal Basic Income joins with and do not contradict the increasingly vast body of all of the other studies that have been done into UBI. The results are as strong as all of the others too but the long term nature of the study adds extra weight to its findings as does the detailed examination of how living without the anxiety that capitalism imposes on us actually improves people’s lives. You can read more about that study here.

Here in Scotland, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in support for a Scottish UBI (the SNP, Greens and Lib Dems both support UBI as party policy and Labour indicate support for a weaker form of Minimum Income) but the UK Government (both Conservative and Labour versions) are ideologically against it, refusing even to facilitate the running of a Scottish UBI pilot despite the success of one in Wales. Studies into the costing of extending UBI schemes across the EU have found that they would be cheaper to implement than is currently being spent mitigating the poverty caused by the lack of one (that is, implementing a UBI would SAVE money, after the costs of poverty are included). The Scottish Government must bring back, as a priority, its plans to test and to ultimately roll out a UBI across Scotland. Much more pressure must be brought to bear on the UK Government to facilitate this rollout as while a UBI would undoubtedly be much easier to implement in an independent Scotland, the costs of poverty – particularly the child poverty that the current First Minister wishes to “eradicate” – are far too high and far to urgent to wait until then. We don’t need more data, or more pilot studies, or more poor people waiting for someone to do something. We just need that action, now, to give us all a Universal Basic Income to allow us to live without the fear, anxiety or exploitation that comes from poverty. Any further argument against UBI has to contend with the data presented in this study and in others and any further argument for delay must accept responsibility for the continued suffering that delay imposes. The time for a UBI is now. Once we have it, I’ll pass over to those who would like to perform a study arguing why it should be taken away.

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Just Work It Off

November 29, 2024December 11, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Work as if you were to live a thousand years, play as if you were to die tomorrow.” – Ben Franklin

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Sir Keir Starmer, Knight of the Realm and Man of the Working People, has declared again that thou shalt work or thou shalt starve.

It’s becoming an increasingly common political line in the UK that the economic woes are all caused by people not working hard enough and there is particular ire being levelled at those who are neither employed nor unemployed (a quite narrow measure of people who are not in but who are actively looking for work) but who are “economically inactive” – who are neither working nor who are looking for work. The other line is that work is the only thing that gives someone’s life purpose and that if you’re not working then you’re a lesser kind of person than someone who is – a failure, or an immoral shirker.

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Billionaire Discovers UBI

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The coronavirus pandemic is exactly the kind of cataclysmic event that brings about drastic changes. I think Medicare For All and UBI are now inevitable. It’s either that, or complete chaos.” – Oliver Markus Malloy

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Techbro Billionaire and founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has just concluded one of the longest running Universal Basic Income experiments to date. He launched the project after becoming intrigued albeit unconvinced by the idea (and as accusations grew that tools like his AI could become an increasing threat to jobs) and he made a show of personally funding the scheme that saw 1,000 low income people being paid $1,000 a month plus 2,000 people receiving $50 as a control group. All participants had a household income below 300% of the federal poverty line (the limit below which people start to qualify for federal low income support – the various thresholds can be found here) and the average household income of participants was $29,000 (approx £22,500 as of current exchange rates).

The results of the study have been overwhelmingly positive and entirely in line with other studies of UBI.

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