Unpacking the Fair Necessities

In 1909, Beatrice Webb was the lead author of the minority report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. In it, she outlined a vision of the welfare state, whose aim would be “to secure a national minimum of civilised life… open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged”. Her researcher, William Beveridge, drew inspiration from this vision when he wrote the 1942 Beveridge report that introduced the welfare state in the UK. Webb’s vision was not of a socialist utopia, but of a fair society. It is closely aligned to the five ‘fair necessities’ that we outline below.

Today’s society falls some way short of achieving this vision. Increasing numbers of people do not enjoy the basic fundamentals that enable them to participate fully in society, such as decent housing, a living wage, or even the ability to afford necessities rather than having to choose between food and heating.

The Fair Necessities are a broad set of fairness principles that are designed to attract support from a majority of the British public. They should appeal to proponents of rival political ideologies, values and moral doctrines. This links to John Rawls’s notion of an ‘overlapping consensus’ (“how supporters of different comprehensive normative doctrines - that entail apparently inconsistent conceptions of justice - can agree on particular principles of justice that underwrite a political community's basic social institutions”).

We recognise that there are often trade-offs to be made between different aspects of fairness. For example, how far should we go in rewarding exceptional contributions, or in helping people who need extra support in order to have fair opportunities? Our hope is that The Fair Necessities, by providing a framework for a fair society, can help to identify those trade-offs and have the debates that are needed to resolve them.

Fair essentials

Everyone should have their basic needs met. This means that no one should live in poverty. Poverty means that people do not have sufficient material resources to adequately meet immediate material needs. This is related to the extent to which people have the resources to engage adequately in a life regarded as the “norm” in society. A family’s level of needs should reflect the size and composition of the household and other relevant factors that impact on needs.

Fair opportunities

We cannot reasonably say that a system that treats everyone equally is fair when peoples' starting points in life are so different. People can only enjoy equal opportunities to succeed when there is a level playing field. The angle of that playing field is now so steep that only the most brilliant of those who find themselves at the bottom can scramble up. To use another metaphor, it’s like a hurdler competing against a sprinter without any extra time allowance. The unfairness starts at birth, and once a child has grown up, it is usually too late to correct for it.

We haven’t done enough to tackle substantive barriers to opportunity - the ‘unfair’ inequalities that are caused by the circumstances of someone’s birth. Where they are born. Their ethnicity. Their gender. Their family’s income. Whether they are disabled. A truly fair society would give each of us the same substantive opportunities to realise their potential, regardless of the circumstances into which we were born.

This means removing the many structural barriers that face people born into disadvantaged circumstances, so that they do not need to be incredibly talented and hardworking to benefit from the same opportunities as everyone else. We cannot escape the fact that this requires us to reduce the degree of economic inequality in our society. As things stand, too many people are swimming against the tide at every turn.

Fair rewards

Many people think that we live in a meritocracy, where talent and hard work are rewarded by success and status, and opportunities are there for whoever is willing to work for them. But this is not true. Childhood circumstances have a huge impact on people’s life chances and outcomes, alongside talent, hard work and random luck during life. So we cannot say that those at the top and those at the bottom of society fully deserve their lot.

Even if we could ‘level up the playing field’ on childhood circumstances, there are many other reasons to question how and why we reward people differently. Some people’s talents and labours are more valued by society (and thus better rewarded) than others, so the amount that people are rewarded often owes more to the vagaries of the labour market than to how hard they work. We don’t value or reward vital unpaid labour (often care work done by women) at all. We don’t value or reward key workers nearly enough. And we allow the market to bestow excessive and unearned rewards on people whose contribution to our shared prosperity – let alone to the social good – is sometimes in net negative territory.

We should reward hard work, but we should ensure that everyone’s contributions are not only valued but fairly rewarded, by narrowing the ‘reward gap’ from both directions. And we need to recognise that huge variations in income in one generation lead to unequal opportunities in the next, even if wealth inequality is both bigger and more important a driver of this than income inequality.

Fair exchange

A fair society should be based around principles of fair exchange. In small groups, this often takes place between individuals or households. But at the societal level, we are more often talking about the ways in which people are supported by the state when they need it, and the ways in which people, in return, enable this by paying taxes. (Of course, this ignores the social and economic contributions of the voluntary and private sectors.)

Everyone needs support from the state at multiple points during their lives. Some need more than others, such as people living with disabilities or illness, or people who are unable to find work. But almost everyone is a significant beneficiary of state support in the form of free education and healthcare, subsidised childcare, tax breaks, and so on. Universal services such as the NHS are popular because they are collectively funded, free at the point of use, and treat people according to need.

Other services could enjoy more popular support, including greater willingness to fund them through the tax system, if they operated on similar principles, rather than being seen as being reserved for those in greatest need. We see this in other countries, for example, in the provision of universal free childcare, or the wider availability of social housing. Meanwhile, a tax system that ensured that everyone contributed fairly (for example, by ending tax avoidance and taxing wealth more effectively) would both raise more funds for those services and increase public willingness to fund them at a higher level through the tax system.

Fair treatment

People should be treated according to need. People who have the same needs should be treated equally (fair process). However, people who have greater needs should receive more support, to enable them to participate in society on an equal footing with others.

Today’s society falls short on both fronts. Many people are denied fair process, such as the disproportionate number of black men who are arrested, convicted and imprisoned in the UK. Many people with greater needs are denied the additional support that they need to overcome the extra barriers that they face. We already treat people according to need in the NHS, and we are making progress in doing so in other areas, such as providing extra support for children with special educational needs. We need to go further and faster in extending this principle across society, by providing extra support to those who face disadvantage because of the circumstances or place of their birth, or to the impact of life events on their life chances.

Our eventual aim should be to break down these barriers completely, but until this is achieved, we need to do much more to compensate for those barriers. This will ensure that everyone is treated fairly. ‘Equal treatment’ (fair process) only makes sense where people have equal needs, and in most contexts we are a very long way from this situation. We also need to do more to achieve social equality, so that everyone is treated with equal respect and has equal influence on decisions made in their names, regardless of their economic status.

We cannot reasonably say that a system that treats everyone equally is fair when peoples' starting points in life are so different. Equality of opportunity only makes sense if people have access to minimum levels of healthcare, education, housing, information and justice. Otherwise, how can they compete fairly with others?

We can accept the outcome of a competitive process as fair only when the participants have equality in basic capabilities; the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair if some contestants have only one leg. Ha-Joon Chang

One way to compensate for the lack of a level playing field is to design ‘positive action’ schemes, which attempt to achieve equity for disadvantaged people, for example in relation to university admissions or job interviews. These initiatives recognise that some people need more help in order to enjoy equal opportunities. But they face two problems. Firstly, they attract opposition from those who claim that they violate the principles of procedural fairness. Secondly, they tackle the symptoms rather than the causes of unfairness, so they are doomed to fail. The playing field is pitched at too steep an angle; ‘positive action’ interventions that try to compensate for this are too little, too late.

The only way to achieve genuine equality of opportunity is to give everyone equal chances at birth, as far as possible, so that people start life on something near a level playing field. Only if all of these conditions are satisfied can a system of reward and compensation that is based on proportionality and ‘just deserts’ be truly fair.

Where the wider economy lacks fairness in its structures of opportunity and reward, the demand for work as reciprocity requires unfairly disadvantaged workers to work even though other, more advantaged citizens have not made good on their obligations to ensure fair opportunities and rewards. As a matter of fairness, we cannot impose one-sided obligations: there is a failure of reciprocity by the better-off as well. Debra Satz and Stuart White, What is wrong with inequality?

A key test of a fair society is that it effectively removes the multiple and mutually reinforcing barriers that affect not only people born into poorer families or areas but also people who are members of one or more groups that are generally disadvantaged and that form protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 – women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, LGBTQ+, some religions. A fair society would tear down the multiple barriers that stand in the way of a young disabled black girl born into poverty so that she has the same life chances as her wealthy, white, able-bodied male peers. It would recognise that those barriers have a compounding effect, both horizontally (in their interaction with each other) and vertically (over time).

This vision of a fair society is based on reconciling the ideas of proportionality and ‘just deserts’ with a concerted effort to redesign our social and economic institutions so that they deliver genuine equality of opportunity. Achieving this second goal will require society to guarantee certain minimum living standards and standards of public services, and to move closer to equal outcomes than the very unequal society that we live in today. But we do not think that equal outcomes are fair or desirable. Instead, we believe that fairness can best be delivered by guaranteeing everyone genuinely equal opportunities to succeed.

This in turn depends on ensuring that everyone has close-to-equal life chances at birth, equals are treated equally, and those who are still disadvantaged are given additional support.

Fairness also requires that we value everyone equally (even if we accept some level of material inequality to allow people to be rewarded for talent and hard work), rather than positioning people in a status hierarchy based on perceived ‘merit’.

Policies have a much greater chance of gaining public support if they are developed with an understanding of the core beliefs of different population segments, both in their design and communication. For example, policies intended to address inequality need to combine tackling systemic factors with genuinely creating opportunity and rewarding work and responsibility – an approach that can hold together support across all segments.

More in Common, Britain's Choice

We call this approach balanced fairness. Our proposed Fair Necessities form the basis of an organising philosophy that most people in Britain would support. This in turn could underpin a platform for root-and-branch reform of the way that our society and economy is organised, which could draw support from a wide range of political traditions and parties.