Cost of Living: Should Government Pay For Life's Essentials? (Anna Coote)

Gabriel Gatehouse (0:08)

Hello, this is Radical with me, Gabriel Gatehouse. How are you doing with the Cozy Lives? That's the cost of living crisis to you if you're older than Gen Z, which I am. I only heard this phrase for the first time a few weeks ago. But it doesn't really matter what generation you belong to. I think most of us have felt the effect of life getting more expensive in recent years. The price of food, bills, rent have all risen steeply. And wages? Well, not so much. Cozy Lives, we all feel it. Okay. So what if someone came up with a scheme whereby we get all or most of that for free? Housing, utilities, transport, childcare. What if all of that was provided free at the point of use, like an NHS for everything? Yeah? What's not to like? Or perhaps it doesn't sound so great. Perhaps it sounds like something out of the Soviet Union. Either way, it sounds a bit like a fantasy, right?

Well, the idea is known as Universal Basic Services. And actually, there are serious people who are seriously proposing such a scheme, and they've done serious work to figure out how it might be achievable and affordable.

One of those people is Anna Coote. She's principal fellow at the New Economics Foundation, which says its mission is to transform the economy, so that it works for people and the planet.

So let's take a deep dive into Universal Basic Services with an open mind and a critical lens.

Anna Coote, welcome to Radical.

Anna Coote (1:50)

Thank you for having me.

Gabriel Gatehouse (1:51)

Thank you very much for coming in. In a sentence, could you sum up this idea, Universal Basic Services, what is it?

Anna Coote (2:01)

In a sentence. Thought or to?

Gabriel Gatehouse (2:04)

I'll give you a little bit of leeway.

Anna Coote (2:05)

The first job of government is to make sure that everyone has access to the things that meet their basic needs, the things that we all need to survive and live a life worth living. There's very little controversy about what those things are, whether you talk to ordinary people in the street or to academics. It's housing, it's food, it's clean air and water, it's health care, it's childcare, adult social care, housing, transport, energy, access to the Internet.

There's not much controversy about that. These are basic needs, it's not a definitive list, but those are the basics. And the idea is that they are free or genuinely affordable. So they're not just free and given to you, but they are either free or genuinely affordable, depending on the service and the circumstances. And they're provided collectively through public institutions, because they manifestly can't be provided through the market. The market has failed to provide these things.

Gabriel Gatehouse (3:09)

So all the basic stuff that we need, roof over our heads, food on our plates, transport, education, healthcare, would be met by the state.

Anna Coote (3:20)

That's the idea, that's the plan. And underpinning all of those things, and this is really important, is a safe planet. Right. Because if you don't have a planet to live on, then it doesn't matter whether you have your needs met or not.

Gabriel Gatehouse (3:33)

So all of that needs to be...

Anna Coote (3:34)

So that is fundamental to this programme, this idea.

Gabriel Gatehouse (3:37)

In an economically sustainable way.

Anna Coote (3:39)

It's sustainable, it's collective, and it's for everybody.

Gabriel Gatehouse (3:43)

All right. Well, I mean, you know, you put it like that, it sounds great. And we'll dig into the details of whether it is, in fact, great and whether it's, in fact, possible. But first, I want to know about you. You've had a long and varied career as a journalist, a campaigner and a policy person.

Just tell me, from where have you come to this point? And I don't mean geographically, what has led you to being the universal basic services person?

Anna Coote (4:12)

I think it's hard to sum it up, but I think you could say there were three things, sort of formative times in my life. And one was when I was a young journalist, not particularly radical at the time, who discovered women's liberation or feminism and got involved in the women's movement. When are we talking? Late 60s? We're talking late 60s, very late 60s, early 70s and through the 70s and from then on, if you like. And being a journalist writing about all these issues, seemingly for the first time, and being passionately committed to the idea of everybody having an equal chance of a good life.

And then there was the time that I spent with the UK Sustainable Development Commission, which was from 2000 to 2009, where I learned from my colleagues on the commission about the connections between social policy and environmental policy and sustainability and what it entailed and why it was so important and how we can go about making the connections between social justice and environmental sustainability.