31.05.2025

Universal Basic Services: Building public luxury

More news about the topic

This report sets out a transformative vision for Universal Basic Services (UBS) as a foundation for collective flourishing. At a time of deepening crises—economic, ecological, and social—it calls for a new settlement: one in which the state guarantees access to life’s essentials not as a minimum safety net, but as a shared infrastructure of public abundance.

The UK is facing a crisis of unmet needs. Decades of privatisation and underinvestment have left core services—from food and housing to transport and care—fractured, inaccessible, and unequal. The report proposes a universal, publicly funded system of essential services—free at the point of use and organised around human need.

This includes:

• A Public Food Service offering free nutritious meals, shared pantries, and community dining.

• A massive expansion of public housing, alongside the decommodification of existing stock.

Free local transport and reinvestment in national and rural networks to reconnect people and places.

• A care system that integrates health and social care through local, preventative and community-led models.

• Guaranteed access to information and digital tools, including free broadband, device repair and training.

• A reimagining of culture and leisure as essential, with libraries, lidos, galleries and sports facilities embedded in every community.

At the heart of the proposal is public luxury: the idea that universal services should be abundant, beautiful and life-enhancing—not minimal or merely functional. UBS provides a practical pathway to lower the cost of living, strengthen democratic participation, and make the green transition socially just—replacing artificial scarcity with collective abundance.
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