Hard cash

We were interested in this recent story, which reports that £35 vouchers are being offered by a Barnsley College, to students who quit smoking for 3 months. According to the Council’s public health team “financial incentives are an effective way to help people quit and stay quit, even after the incentives end.”

The idea is interesting, in that it challenges many of the conventional assumptions, not just about public health but about behaviour change and social investment more generally. Giving people money to do something would often be seen as a fairly clunky mechanism. It might be regarded as inherently short-term, as failing to get to the root of the problem, or as an initiative which will yield a low return on investment.

Yet Barnsley Council aren’t alone in seeking to challenge these assumptions. Former government minister Rory Stewart made an interesting argument in a recent Podcast (listen from 15 minutes in), when talking about a development charity, Give Directly, whose work he supports. The charity give $1,000 worth of cash families in the poorest parts of the developing world, to spend as they please.

Stewart argues that “giving people cash is probably the most effective single intervention that you can do for a very poor family, because the truth is in almost every case they know how to spend the money much better than a foreigner does and there’s [also] an element of dignity.”

Within UK politics, meanwhile, the idea of Universal Basic Income has gained traction in recent years – not just on the far left but in more centrist circles too. “Labour for a Basic Income” argues that it provides more security and better wellbeing for citizens than other ways of spending money – pointing to research from Finland.

The benefits of initiatives based on hard cash are difficult to quantify. It remains to be seen whether the core premise is strong enough to apply to teenage smokers in Barnsley, families in the developing world and citizens in the UK. But the factor which such initiatives potentially bring, touched upon by Stewart, is a sense of agency and potentially, greater feelings of dignity and trust. For this reason, such ideas can no longer be dismissed out of hand.