The Basic Income for Artists has already proved its value according to all government reports. More importantly it’s stopped behaving like a “pilot scheme” and started behaving like essential infrastructure.
People have planned their lives around it. They’ve worked more, not less, taken risks they couldn’t take before, some people have even secured mortgages!
For many of the 2000 people about to come off the scheme in the next week or so all of these developments are in danger and that truly is a tragedy of planning.
According to this government the Basic Income kicks off again in September 2026. But do we just rinse and repeat, or do we take the opportunity to plan for permanence? Are we are willing to finish the job?
What if the next challenge was resolving the design flaws: The Basic Income looks like a grant, is treated like income, and is governed as an exception.
This confusion is the main weakness of the scheme. Coupled with that, because it sits outside the social protection system:
• it interacts badly with welfare supports,
• it creates uncertainty around illness, housing, and life events,
• and it remains politically fragile, vulnerable to reframing as discretionary spending, and dependent on arbitrary political will.
What if the big challenge is understanding that this is a Basic Income Policy, not an Arts Policy. In truth, none of this is about the arts and we need to stop talking about it in the exceptional language of arts policy. Basic Income is about where income supports belong.
Surely, if something provides income security, it belongs in the income security system.
“Grants” fund activity. Income supports secure people. BIA is built on a grant logic trying to solve income problems, the state makes this mistake quite a bit and it never quite works.
Now, the pilot has shown, quietly but decisively, that artistic labour doesn’t fail because of a lack of talent or ambition. It fails because of income volatility. Therefore, if we can reduce the volatility, the rest of the system starts working again.
That underlines the previous point:
Basic Income isn’t an arts intervention. It’s a labour intervention. And that’s worth memorising.
The inevitable next step in this logic: put it where income lives, inside the system that already knows how to do this job.
The social protection system is already set up to:
• support people who work intermittently,
• allow earnings alongside payments,
• manage volatility through taxation and annual assessment,
• and provide continuity across illness, care, and ageing.
Arguably the Back to Work Enterprise Allowance is an early version of the Basic Income Scheme.
Keeping the Basic Income outside that system is no longer neutral. It actively undermines the scheme (as all the people who discovered they were losing their disability benefits will tell you)
Integration isn’t radical. It’s administrative common sense.
It’s important to remember that the welfare system already allows people to work, earn, and receive income supports at the same time. (What it doesn’t handle well is pretending income is a grant).
Once earnings are treated normally – taxed annually, assessed over time rather than week-by-week – the problems disappear. People work more when the cliff edges are removed. We already know this.
There’s a real temptation to think of the next phase as a fight: more funding, more cohorts, more advocacy. But the real task is far more tedious.
What if the next stage of BIA is:
• turning the pilot into a statutory payment, protected by legislation
• moving from discretion to legal entitlement,
• shifting from being exceptional to being protected in a larger system.
If we accept that the Basic Income belongs in social protection, something else becomes clear: artists are not a special case. They are just an early one.
Artists labour reveal what happens when work is intermittent, value is long-term, and income doesn’t arrive neatly every Friday. And that’s no longer unusual. It’s increasingly normal.
The Basic Income doesn’t need defending as an arts policy. It needs finishing as a labour and welfare policy. All it needs is some political will, and a few legislative tweaks and we can have the system the international press currently and mistakenly thinks we have.
And finishing it means putting it where it was always heading anyway..
And just for the record even 8000 artists (four times the current cohort) would account for approximately only 0.48% of the 2026 Department of Social Protection budget. Less than half of one percent. Mull that over for a second.
Consultant - Arts, Culture and Creative Industries 