Introduction

Chapter 8 describes a consultation undertaken by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) that considered four implementation methods for Citizen's Basic Income:

• 1. A Citizen's Basic Income for every UK citizen, large enough to take every household off means-tested benefits (including Working Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, and Universal Credit), and to ensure that no household with low earned income would suffer a financial loss at the point of implementation. The scheme would be implemented all in one go.

• 2. A Citizen's Basic Income for every UK citizen, funded from within the current tax and benefits system by charging National Insurance Contributions on all earnings at 12%, reducing to zero the Income Tax Personal Allowance, and raising Income Tax rates. Current means-tested benefits would be left in place, and each household's means-tested benefits would be recalculated to take into account household members’ Citizen's Basic Incomes in the same way as earned income is taken into account. Again, implementation would be all in one go.

• 3. This scheme would start with an increase in Child Benefit. A Citizen's Basic Income would then be paid to all 16-year-olds, and they would be allowed to keep it as they grew older, with each new cohort of 16-year-olds receiving the same Citizen's Basic Income and being allowed to keep it.

• 4. Inviting volunteers among the pre-retired, between the age of 60 and the state pension age.

We know that a Citizen's Basic Income scheme that abolished existing means-tested benefits, and that was funded purely by making adjustments to the current Income Tax system, would generate significant losses for low-income households. A Citizen's Basic Income scheme that both abolished existing means-tested benefits and avoided losses for low-income households would need additional funding from outside the current tax and benefits systems. In the foreseeable future such additional funding is unlikely to be forthcoming. In the longer term a Citizen's Basic Income large enough to enable current means-tested benefits to be abolished while not imposing losses on lowincome households might be a possibility, but its current infeasibility suggests that further research effort in this direction is unlikely to be immediately useful.