The crises are not stopping: why we urgently need an income floor system
Will Stronge
16th June 2026
When will we learn?
Once again, a crisis has arrived and the government is scrambling. According to reporting in The Times back in March, with energy and food costs set to spike in the wake of the Iran war, ministers have been desperately trying to figure out how to get money to struggling households and largely finding they simply can’t. HMRC records income by individual whilst the government would want to target households: the database says no. So, reports suggested, the government could default to targeting benefits claimants and using the warm home discount as a rough and ready proxy for need. “The methods of targeting are imperfect,” a government source admitted. That is quite the understatement.
Let’s not forget that this is now the third time in six years we have watched the same scene play out. When the Covid pandemic arrived, the state had to improvise emergency cash transfers at enormous speed via the furlough scheme. The Ukraine war came shortly afterwards, along with the energy price shock that ensued and again left Whitehall flat-footed, designing support schemes such as the Energy Price Freeze on the fly – which were only implemented after substantial pressure from groups like the ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign. Now, we have a third economic shock on the horizon, and we are somehow back at square one: the same panicked conversations, the same infrastructure gaps, and the same imperfect workarounds.
At some point we have to stop calling these events ‘surprises’. As Adam Tooze has suggested, we are living through an era of ‘polycrisis’. Climate shocks, geopolitical instability, energy market volatility, pandemic risk are now all less once-in-a-generation anomalies arriving inconveniently close together, than the basic texture of the decades ahead. Treating each one as an unforeseeable emergency, and each response as a one-off patch, is not a policy strategy but something adjacent to the definition of madness.
Cash transfers
A central part of the answer has to be building a robust cash transfer system. Ideally, this would have happened six years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, but doing so now would still be vastly preferable to doing so later, so we can be ready for when the next crisis arrives – just as Germany was better placed to adapt to the 2008 financial crisis through the Kurzarbeit scheme.
Any new system needs to include some form of basic income: a regular, unconditional payment to all UK residents that can be dialled up or down depending on the severity of what the country is facing. In a stable period it can be set at a modest level, providing a floor beneath people’s feet. Then, when a crisis hits – say when energy costs explode, or supply chains collapse, or a health emergency shuts down the economy – it is ready, waiting, as one of the first levers that the government pulls.
Of course, there are obvious costs to this system, but as UBI advocates have been saying for generations now, the cost of not having such a system is already being paid – through the damage to lives when millions of people cut back on heating and food; through the damage to the economy when consumer spending dries up; and the damage to our politics when civil unrest buttresses false narratives peddled by the far right. Universal payments that go to everyone, including the wealthy who will help fund it through taxation, would build the broad coalition of support that makes the system durable across governments and crises. Heavily targeted systems simply can’t achieve that buy-in.
Three crises in, we now understand that the infrastructure we need is not akin to a pop-up shop but rather requires a long-term change to the circuitry of our economy. The question is whether we build it before the next crisis, or simply stumble into one with the same cluelessness once again.
Will Stronge is Chief Executive at the Autonomy Institute.