‘We can’t believe you would just trust us’: why social assistance shouldn’t come with strings attached

When the authorities provide social assistance to those in need, it almost always comes with conditions attached. These include behavioural requirements or criteria determining who is and isn’t eligible for support.

Common examples include proving that you’re looking for a job, are too ill to do so, or that you fall into a particular category that policymakers have decided is worthy of aid – for example, working children or single parents.

This approach is problematic for at least three reasons. First, it can be ineffective, because targeted support like this often excludes many who desperately need it. Second, it can be inefficient, because behavioural controls are often ill-designed and inappropriate, while policing them requires expensive, unwieldy bureaucracy.

Third, it is often contrary to human dignity. Evidence from many countries shows that the administrative practices associated with conditions have a tendency towards discrimination and dehumanisation.

So, what is the alternative? Simply put, to provide social assistance unconditionally, without behavioural requirements or targeting. In other words, to provide assistance to all and with no strings attached.

Colleagues and I from joint research teams in the UK, India and Bangladesh have recently completed two large-scale policy experiments that attempted to do this in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, and the Indian city of Hyderabad.

In both cases, we provided unconditional assistance to all residents of five urban communities. The assistance combined unconditional cash and open-ended participatory forms of community organising delivered by social workers embedded in the communities.

Cash was pegged at basic income levels in both countries and the organising was focused on building relationships, developing capacity, and above all on generating locally rooted solutions to locally identified problems.

Our findings offer great cause for hope. Alongside predictable reductions in poverty, the basic income generated improvements in health, wellbeing, access to education, and quality of housing. We also found what we are calling a “dignity dividend” attached to it. The cash signifies to recipients that they matter, and that the material difficulties they face and their humanity are both recognised and worth responding to.

The lack of conditions here is essential. Recipients repeatedly contrasted this with painful experiences of stigmatisation at the hands of mainstream welfare provision. As one woman put it: “we can’t believe you would just trust us”.

Making space for good things to happen

Our research suggests that the community organising that was wrapped around the cash also operates as an effective form of social protection unto itself. This is because it enables connection to services or bottom-up responses to individual and group challenges that would not have been possible had we come with pre-set notions of what was the “right” thing to do.

For example, in Dhaka, affordable healthcare was unavailable to most people and represented a priority. In response, the community organisers set up monthly health camps in partnership with local providers to offer basic, low-cost healthcare to hundreds.

But the real magic appears to lie at the intersection between the cash and the community organising. The cash seems to motivate participation in the community work, while the community work catalyses the impact of the cash.

We saw this especially in the formation of a labour union among the garbage collectors participating in our experiment in India. The union has gone on to make groundbreaking demands of local authorities in relation to working conditions and pay.

Evidence from parallel experiments around the world is showing similar trends. One inspiring example with formerly incarcerated people in the southern US has shown a massive drop in recidivism.

Another, with disadvantaged people of colour in the American mid-west, has shown benefits across indicators including health, wellbeing and work. These findings have been echoed in Peru in an experiment with indigenous Amazonian communities.

Importantly, this approach to providing social assistance is beginning to take hold more widely. The international charity, Give Directly, offers cash to the poor with no strings attached, arguing that dollar-for-dollar this is by far the most efficient and effective approach.

And in South Africa and Brazil, advocates are pushing for the replacement of patchy, targeted social safety nets with a universal basic income that provides all citizens with a degree of guaranteed security.

The conclusion from this new wave of research is hard to escape: we don’t need punitive and exclusive forms of conditional welfare provision. In fact, this approach may well be counterproductive.

So, while our leaders continue to impose austerity on us, following former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s infamous dictum that “there is no alternative”, the evidence strongly suggests otherwise. There is an alternative, and it is unconditional.

Neil Howard received funding to support the research discussed here from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 805425. It was further supported by funding for the Child Labour Action Research in South and Southeast Asia Consortium (CLARISSA), provided by the UK Government via its (then) Department for International Development (DFID). He works for the University of Bath is a Trustee of the Basic Income Earth Network.