Proposals for Universal Basic Income (UBI) have risen in political salience in the last decade. Policymakers, community activists and UBI advocates have designed field experiments to test the impact of policies that share many features with a UBI, and researchers have undertaken several microsimulations of the costs and benefits and distributional consequences of UBI proposals in different national contexts.

In this report, Dr Joe Chrisp, Professor Nick Pearce, Professor Matteo Richiardi and Justin van de Ven pursue an alternative strategy, and consider a series of incremental, pragmatic reforms that might be considered steps and stages on the road to a UBI as well as worthwhile in their own right. They explore the cost and distributional consequences of the proposals, examining individual steps and a combined or cumulative approach. While these reforms would maintain Universal Credit and household means testing as a core part of the social security system, they would greatly increase the level of support to low-income households and ease the burdens associated with the existing work-first benefit system.

Updated January 2025.