And giving someone a wage subsidy for low-paid work hasn't worked either. Ask any person whether they deserve to earn more? Your point is completely devoid of

And giving someone a wage subsidy for low-paid work hasn't worked either. Ask any person whether they deserve to earn more? Your point is completely devoid of any attempt to reason objectively. We have a minimum income system already (UC was designed to be a taper like NIT or UBI). People are quite happy to accept free food if it is being offered, but look at how much we spend on welfare...it is staggering (if you look at stats on food bank usage, you will also see that usage is highest amongst groups i.e. single people who don't receive the really valuable UC benefits i.e. CTCs...food bank usage is generally terribly uninformative though because if you give free food, people will take it). Yes there is evidence of a hidden army of unemployed, that is why I mentioned repeatedly that people often don't understand. If you are familiar with DWP stats, you would know that unemployment benefit is now being phased out totally. But some people on UC who do not work are not recorded as unemployed (this numbers 3.9m). And there is evidence that a lot of the people on ESA are claiming because they are also unable to work (at least, 500k iirc). And, of course, the point of UC was to get people back into work...but it has led to people earning £15k/year working min wage for 10 hours/week, that gap is money that would have been unemployment twenty years ago but isn't now. So we have swapped paying unemployment for a wage subsidy...again, you don't appear to understand this, the point was: we will pay people to work rather than sit on the dole (through offering a subsidy that lifts low wage), this should have led to more output...it didn't. Btw, this is all obvious without having detailed knowledge of DWP statistics...you are saying how desperately poor everyone is...unemployment is the lowest it has been for five decades, how does that make sense to you? Wage growth is 4% below inflation, how does that make sense to you? Just saying lol, increase productivity...okay, that is what UC was for...this has been tried before, the problem is that there far too many people in the UK and not enough work (it is zero-sum because population growth is so far in excess of productivity growth).