 Okay, welcome everybody to the third seminar we are offering as the Green European Foundation, together with Transition Verde and supported by the European Parliament on UBI on universal basic incomes. We have had already two seminars here and web seminars and now today is our third one and we will talk about pilot projects on UBI. We really are happy that you are joining us, that you follow with us in the debate. I will introduce you in a moment the two speakers of the day and how we organize ourselves. But just to say a few sentences before because the Green European Foundation is working already since a longer time on universal basic income. By the way, my name is Susanne Rieger. I'm one of the coordinators of the UBI Transnational Projects for the Fundación New Horizons in Catalonia. During this year we have produced a lot of materials, a lot of studies, one brochure about Europe, about the projects and the ongoing debates on UBI all over Europe. We have another publication about the COVID impact and the debates on UBI. All this you can find it on our website of Jeff, what is a place where you can find a lot of information and beside of the publications and beside of the recordings of the seminars also an online course on UBI where I will refer at the end of this meeting again for. So we are happy to join with you this and to follow up with the debates because we think that UBI is a really important topic in not only in Europe, in principle worldwide, but we as foundation are focusing more on the European side. So I would like to introduce you our two speakers and first of all we have here with us at the moment you don't see him, but you will hope there he is back with the camera on. You have Mike Dansen. He is an economist, Professor Emeritus of Enterprise Policy of the Harriet Watts University, Visiting Professor in Energy Policy of the University of Stress Clyde and Fellow of Academic of Social Science. So he has a long background in the science area, has published a lot of books, but I think for today the most important is that Mark is the share of the Basic Income Network of Scotland and the chair also of the Basic Income Earth Network of the World Congress in 2021. So we will have here an expert from Scotland who will give us later an an update on the pilot which is going on in Scotland, but before we go to Scotland we stay in Spain and here I'm really happy that we have Julien Ballin with us, a Spanish also economist, politician and researcher, specialized in the unconditional basic income. He has been elected and has been politician in the Basque in the Basque Parliament for a time and now he's professor in the university, has done his PhD on universal basic income and will give us today an overview of one clear pilot we have had in Barcelona, but not only this, he also as he has worked part of the course of the online course we have done in Jeff, he has a big overview also over all different other pilots about it. So we will start with a concrete example and then we will wind up and then we go into the second part also with the Scottish view. The idea is that we heard here now first the two speakers and after this I will open up the floor for you for questions, for debates and to see how we can follow up and move in this in this sphere of pilots in the UBI debate, but first of all Julien the floor is yours, welcome here with us. You still have your microphone inside. Yeah you know sometimes happens. Thank you very much Susanne and thank you very much to the Green European Foundation, it's always a pleasure to be with you and I'll try to be on time as always you know it's sometimes difficult but we'll try. Okay yes you said Susanne we have done that course that it's on the Green European Foundation page of basic income and you've got all the information about different projects so I tried to focus on Barcelona's but if you have any questions or whatever about other pilot projects you of course can ask them all right. So I think before examinating that project and the results I think it's interesting to take a short break to speak about the referendum that took place in Switzerland in 2016 because it was for the first time where an entire country voted in a referendum for or against the basic income the implementation of a basic income yep and the proposal was well it was due monthly basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs that in their words would allow the entire population to live a dignified life and participate in public life all right it was rejected with the 76.5 percent of voters against but it took 23.1 percent of voters in favor and this rejects rejection let's say it was predictable of course but despite this rejection I think that we have to understand that the referendum was such an important step forward okay and of course as I said the rejection was predictable because the national leadership of almost all parties in Switzerland including the Socialist Party recommend the voting no yeah the only exceptions were the Green Party and the political insignificant pirate party that recommended voting yes and some cantonal let's say branches of Socialist parties in the three linguistic areas but the result was suspected but it's not bad however to repeat that one out of four people voted for a basic income and there were picks of for example 35 percent in the canton of Geneva 36 percent in the canton of Basel city and 40 percent in the city of Bern and some really important 54 percent more than a half in some central districts of Swedish yeah so what's even more important for me it's interesting to see how this referendum allowed a lot of people to hear for the first time the concept of basic income so in the days leading up to the referendum the economists the Wall Street Journal the financial times New York Times the Guardian and so on well were forced to publish articles trying to explain in depth the concept of basic income some of them did quite well some of them didn't so well but they try to explain what basic income was all about so this expansion this led to an expansion of of the concept of basic income so if we want to understand where basic income has gained in my opinion a larger space both in the political the academic or the public opinion agenda I always say that we have to look at least at three factors first one the failure of minimum income programs second one the pollution of the labor market and the third one the proliferation of pilot projects or experiments throughout the world when speaking about Barcelona we have spoken so much about Finland, Kenya, Namibia, Canada, the States in the 70s and so on when speaking about Barcelona we have to speak about BEM income it's called BEM income income taken from Canada yeah and it's a 17 million pilot project carried out by the by the Barcelona City Council and it's co-founded by the European Union's European Innovative Actions which is well it tries to provide resources to to find new solutions to to address different global challenges we have in the 21st century and this BEM income strategy was based on testing a guaranteed minimum income together with active social policies this is not basic income of course but in addition there was an income modality without any active social policy it could be similar to a basic income so this objective the objective of the program was to improve the socioeconomic situation of these households evaluating the impact that different public policy designs can have on the capacity of households to emerge stronger and to overcome vulnerability and dependence on both public and private resources to cover their basic needs so I try to to share my my screen here can you see it you see this yeah so this is the resource axis in Barcelona which is one of the most deprived of poor neighborhoods in Barcelona and this is where the experiment was carried out and so it was taken we can see a little bit down if I go down how the program was a structure all right so the treatment groups were a structure in according to four participation modalities what is conditional modality there were 531 persons numbers are not good there uh non-conditional there are 419 households sorry limited modality and uh non-limited modality okay and there are four active policies as I said it's quite complex this program this experiment so the first one is um targeted to 152 households it's a training program and municipal employment plans second one active policy targeted to 99 households it's a program to promote cooperativism and the social and solidarity economy the third one it's a targeted to 10 households and it's a housing renovation program that means that home owners have the opportunity to rent out rooms and to obtain a higher return that's one request can you put the graphic a little bit bigger yep I try to put it on the full screen this works maybe it's better in full screen yeah okay yes um this way no I yeah all right it's this graph okay okay and the third one uh as I said housing renovation program and the last one uh targeted to 2070 households is a community participation program okay so these activities and programs were intended to lead to improvements in social relations and interactions to improve employability skills and to project development and decision making and social responsibility okay but it was also launched uh what it was called REC uh R E C and this is real economic uh currency it's like an electronic city and citizen currency and this was um targeted to virtual payment methods designed to promote the transformation of urban social and economic models okay this tries to let's say generate uh new economic circuits uh revitalize of course small businesses and to promote um some way um a circular economy right so which were the results of of this uh how can I go this all right which were the results uh we obtained from from this uh project first we obtained some improvement in key aspects such as uh reaction in server material deprivation and uh food insecurity this means also reducing sorry and the impact of rent and mortgages among households okay and reducing the need to ask family and friends for money secondly we obtained a significant increase in the degree of satisfaction with life and we have also seen that result in other projects uh an increase in the sense of belonging to the neighborhood that it's really good because basic income is not divisive socially okay in those who give and those who receive and uh we also obtained a greater generation of links between participants and social workers based basically on less uh assistantialism policies and third there also uh we obtained an improvement in the sales of local and proximity business on the other hand it's true that some of the expected impacts uh weren't confirmed for example that some impacts we have seen in other um experiments such as the health dimension uh we didn't confirm significant improvements in the health dimension secondly it was found that participation in active policies of the BEM income didn't stimulate the willingness to enter partnership and enter partnership sorry uh this is something it was confirmed in Kenya for example but not here in Barcelona and third um well contrary to what um people might have imagined this experiment doesn't seem to have any significant effect on the likelihood of enjoying a greater individual leisure okay that's something also that has been confirmed in other experiments and finally this is paradoxical but the citizen currency doesn't seem to have succeeded in strengthening the network between neighbors entities and businesses because also consumers express a greater trust in those businesses associated with citizen currency the businesses do not confirm this this perception so um finally um or closing I think that we have or we must be aware that uh also the the results obtained through a pilot project are useful somehow uh to show and to evidence certain interesting data and aspects and they usually have at least five major common limitations that don't allow us to appreciate uh the effects than uh what a whole basic income could have um on the city and um but that lead us to treat those results with care all right so first uh and this is evident at first sight uh it's that pilot projects are limited in time all right the result of the limitation in time is that it's not possible to analyze people's behavior in the same way as if they have a guaranteed material existence throughout their lives this while one of the results of Barcelona was that maybe the health health staff could be another another thing or the result could be another one if the pilot project was not limited in time secondly we have to take into account that a sample of the population is usually used to carry out the program okay a sample that is usually not significant and that cannot be generalized to the total population because it tends to be saturated for example in Finland uh there were long time unemployed people okay thirdly and yeah taking in mind that a sample is usually chosen we have a problem that comes from the impossibility of including net contributors to the system all right people that uh if we would finance a basic income through a fiscal reform they would end up losing okay they would pay more taxes so pilot projects have zero tax effects and fourthly since pilot projects do not include people who are net contributors to a system they are financed through subsidies budgetary financed or donations all right and finally and due to the time limitation the effect that basic income could have on the labor market for example that is something we basic income advocates make a lot a lot of effort in in studying that it's not or cannot be observed through through pilot projects so even though knowing that there are some limitations of course pilot projects and experiments all around the world are yeah to a great extent one of the most significant items that led us or led a lot of people to know about the concept of basic income and as I said a lot of newspapers to to open uh more than once uh with with basic income on the on the front pages now so I think we have to know and put uh give a lot of uh well a lot of value to those experiments knowing uh every time that they have some limitations and that we can not overcome that that limitations so 40 minutes I think thank you thank you very much uh uh Julio I I have seen that there is a question uh um in the in the chat uh as it is a quite specific one maybe I can you can if you can answer it directly can you read it directly so the question is um how have the health uh effects been assessed in the basalona trail which component of health physical mental social spiritual has been included in the assessment um maybe we can if it's possible to answer this directly and then uh we go to the uh Scottish uh example and then we have a broader debate about it yeah well but it was uh both fisic or fisic I don't know how to say and psychological health all right we can go further or deeper later on okay okay okay so let's stop here and we take it back uh when we when we talk in January later so I thank you very much uh Julio and I would like to give the floor now to Mike to present the uh example of Scotland thank you okay um thank you very much for the invitation and hello everybody um the you you gave my my various titles earlier um one thing to say within Scotland we have a lot of leadership around basic income both from that from the Scottish government and it became very clear during COVID during our lockdowns last year that the Scottish government was in favour of basic income and was arguing for it to be introduced but we've also seen people from below through our various citizens assemblies people's panels and so on that that the people are arguing for basic income so we have this both from above and from below the um okay you're seeing my second screen now hopefully um we as chair said we held the the world the global congress in Glasgow this August it was the biggest ever meeting of people in favour of basic income um a thousand speak sorry a thousand delegates 250 speakers and so on again there were leading politicians from across the UK and beyond in favour and the the co-author with Pope Francis of his book on basic income spoke as did others and we had world agencies we covered such issues as COVID the climate emergency both of which people were arguing basic income it had a major contribution to make and in scotland but also right around the world and we believe basic income can address poverty and inequality and there was a lot of talk about advocating and networking by basic income groups so it's well embedded into Scottish society the Scottish economy but also beyond and all those presentations and papers and so on are still up online and I've put the link in there it was interesting that in some of the sessions we had the United Nations your needle your nisco world bank and so on people from these global agencies talking in favour of basic income and now of course started yesterday coq 26 is in the same city but and that but's important that it scotland as such is not at the table at coq 26 and we don't have the powers to be able to implement basic income and i'll return to that near the end the the the mission statement we had for the basic income congress which we created as the the organising team with our volunteers stressed about human rights that basic income should be part of the the basic human rights most countries have signed up to United Nations declaration on human rights which includes the right to be free from poverty insecurity and so forth and and of course we argued in favour of basic income and the Scottish government and the parliament increases taking a rights-based approach to many aspects of our economy and society so again basic income is very much consistent with that so where did all this interest and support for basic income come from in scot well there were a few of us who've been working it for for many years but in 2017 the scottish parliament social security committee became interested and asked for evidence around these fundamental questions what level of base income should there be how would we fund it and could scotland introduce it here based on our current devolved powers so we have the west mince of the uk parliament and which supreme parliament and holds a lot of powers but some have been devolved to the scotch government and similarly to the welshers the welsh assembly government to northern ireland and and the cities in england and around that time of forwards we had as i said people from below arguing for basic income we and others created this group within the scottish parliament across different parties to argue in favour and all of that led to the scottish government establishing a feasibility study group and in 2018 and that was from four local authorities who were interested in running a pilot basic income from our national health service the improvement service which serves to improve the professionalism of public and civil servants and so on so all of that was supported by the scottish government and scottish parliament to undertake a study into how feasible would it be to have a citizen's basic income in scotland in pilot areas and then across the country and again i've put links at the bottom of our own organisation basic income network scotland those who published the feasibility study basic income scott and jamie kook who's sent his apologies he was going to be speaking today from the rsa okay so again a lot of academic and rigorous research underpinning the work before the feasibility study the feasibility study was a two-year project it published last june and it was really widely recognised in scotland across the uk within the basic income network globally has been a very robust and rigorous piece of work it was quite extensive it's way over a hundred pages and it was a very sober reflection as well of what would be the challenges and difficulties of introducing basic income into scotland it was accompanied by a very technical and economic modelling approach both in a macro model and also a macro model and it was iterative so these work back and forth between each other to create the first wave of looking at what the potential impact would be of having a basic income at a national level in scotland critically it was also important that the feasibility study and the government therefore informed about how feasible would it be to have a basic income and was there enough political support that not only would this government and be able to introduce it but it could run for long enough that future governments would also support the pilot the evaluation and ultimately if it was decided to introduce it nationally whether it would continue would it be embedded into the Scottish policy framework going forward the institutional aspects of feasibility I've already suggested you know institutions are very complex everywhere but in the Scottish case and in the Basque country in Catalonia and so forth you have a national government you have the the governments below that as well as cities and below that and so forth so in the Netherlands we've got a number of experiments in in Dutch cities because their law allows those cities to be able to introduce pilot basic incomes the position in scotland, Wales, other parts of the United Kingdom it is different so they had to see what sort of institutional framework was there was it compatible was it feasible to introduce a base income and psychologically would it be socially acceptable would the general public accept the idea of a base income as a pilot and then more generally one of the COP meetings I was at yesterday we talked about a social license whether public giving us the license for a just transition simply would they give the license would they find acceptable to have a basic income and finally we'd need to design a basic income so we could look at the outcomes the impacts across society within households by individuals and so on what were the unintended consequences how do we know about them how do we model them and that'll be true of work participation in the workplace and family decisions and so forth and also as Reinhardt raised what would be the health impacts etc like any basic income the the feasibility study group accepted and worked with authorities and the government say we will assume and everybody else signs up to the idea of the basic definition of a basic income so payments under it will be regular into a bank account or similar and it will be paid to the individual not to the households and we've argued very strongly that that is quite a critical element of a basic income all adults get it regardless but also children would get a basic income not maybe at the same rate and so forth it would be universal so everybody would get it in the population and for a pilot within the site where the pilot was being undertaken so we decided in Scotland if there were going to be pilots it wouldn't be on particular groups as in Finland for instance rather it would be everybody living in a geographical area and it would be unconditional and it couldn't be withdrawn so there couldn't be sanctions there couldn't be conditions applied so it had this very traditional definition of a basic income in the feasibility study they looked at what sort of levels and in the end they said the pilot should be at two different levels one at the the existing welfare benefit social security payment levels now these are notoriously low in in the UK and they're much lower compared with absolutely the the average income but also compared with what people would get if they were in work and so these are the basic rates for somebody who is unemployed in Britain and these are very low amounts so what's that about 80 euros for somebody between 25 and 65 85 euros a week to live on entirely the so they proposed that the lower level of a basic income pilot would be around those levels and that would be because of the unconditionality it was suggested to those who were on benefits already that you would the stigma of being having to earn your benefits of threatened to be sanctioned of having all benefits stopped those would be removed under a basic income and so we could evaluate what was the impact of of removing that stigmatization and but also everybody else who who was living in the area would also receive the basic income regardless of of what incomes they were on and they also proposed a higher level one that was at the poverty rate that would be enough the minimum income standards for poverty amongst people and so MIS the minimum standard for a working age single person was much more what's that about three times what you get on a well for payments so it suggests that there'd be a high level of a basic income would be paid in a different pilot area so we could compare the impacts on reducing poverty on people's behaviour and ability to sell their new business to take a break from a job to undertake training and so on the the feasibility study identified another few aspects of proposals so they said it should there should be a year to prepare to identify everybody in an area to each other have their own bank accounts who was eligible and so forth and then the pilot would run for three years and then the evaluation would take a year or two so this was going to be quite an extensive pilot period and said population when we chosen a pilot area everybody would be paid it so it'd be a saturation and just in working out the cost of running a basic income pilot we'd need to account for inflation build that in and tax interactions and that basic income be taxable so it'd be roughly for some at the level of the allowance so you don't pay tax but beyond that it would be taxable and so there was very good a lot of work put into thinking about the feasibility of a basic income where it would run how it would run for how long and so forth the detail here isn't important apart from saying there is a lot of detail so this was the evaluation how would we evaluate a basic income pilot in an area of Scotland we look at short-term outcomes of the usually impacts on poverty and so forth health etc and and that would become apparent during the pilot period and intermediate outcomes which would be a bit wider than the area itself and maybe take longer to come through longer term outcomes which may take years to become apparent so we need to model those probably rather than being able to observe them during the pilot period and these mapped on to the the national strategies the national performance frameworks it's called in scotland of tackling poverty and looking after people improving their health making them more active and so forth as i said during covid the scottish government established the citizens assembly to look at a whole range of issues and factors of coming out of the the epidemic the pandemic and the people on that who were just ordinary people drawn from across the population voted to almost two thirds would in favour agreed with the idea of a basic income for everybody to be paid in scotland as a way to overcome the impact of the pandemic so here we had it really come to the phone as i said earlier the scottish government in their pronouncements last year said we thought it was worth looking at a basic income but because of the pandemic because of covid we now think it should be introduced as a matter of urgency the the interest in basic income has grown quite markedly over the last two years right across united kingdom and so in wales in northern ireland we now have basic income groups we have national groups i've picked out some of them there who are active across united kingdom and we see them in many of the cities and quite a few of the the mayors in english cities have said we're in favour of basic income the wales government isn't at the moment is looking at the feasibility of a pilot within wales and and within the uk government or parliament today there was a debate in the wales select committees it's called of looking at a basic income proposal for wales and there's lots of other organizations so everything seems to be done to actually have pilots in scotland why hasn't it happened there are some key barriers and the key barriers are the united kingdom government and united kingdom departments because particularly for scotland which has far more powers than any anywhere else in the uk more than any of the english cities and the wales government and the wales assembly and same in north ron the scottish government has far more powers but it can't introduce a basic income even as a pilot without the agreement of the uk government and in particular the the welfare department departmental works and pensions at the uk level or the tax authority hmrc and behind them the treasury and i've written about that in a few places and again there's since there so where we at we don't actually have pilots in scotland nor anywhere else in united kingdom because nowhere has sufficient powers to be able to introduce it powers over finance powers over welfare benefits and so on and therefore one of three things has to happen either the uk government must change its view on basic income and it's always been very very brief in its responses of just saying no we think the future um to get people out of poverty is they have they have to go to work despite the fact two thirds of everybody in poverty in the uk is actually in a household where there are working people so making um work pay hasn't actually been successful in reducing poverty so if the uk government isn't going to change then either we need devolution of powers to the scottish parliament to the the welsh assembly and so forth or in the scottish case independence in the meantime what are the scottish government doing the it's newly elected it's a coalition between the scottish national party a nationalist and the green party of scotland and together they've put into their program for government the idea of a minimum income guarantee and this is just from their press release they're looking at how to introduce at the moment and it very much says we're going to support delivery of a minimum income guarantee within current powers of the scottish parliament it's also going to look at what further powers might be looked at in the longer term and that's why people in scott and doing favor-based income support the idea of a minimum income guarantee but we do have concerns that it's not enough partly because it's not paid to the individual it's paid to the household and therefore it has implications um for women in particular um so across the uk we have alliances between governments and authorities at the sub-uk level we have a lot of planning and advocating and campaigning for basic income but at the moment we're in the position where nothing can happen until either there's change in national government by uk government or there's a change in the powers given to scotland wales and so forth and thank you very much thank you very much mike for this um in this this overview of the situation in scotland i think it was quite clear on this and what what has taken me just right at the beginning and it was also what combining a little bit with what julien has said before is if we really want to implement a basic income um or a pilot at least but then also for to have it as a base for for to to bring in basic income in different levels we need to have to allow to align the the debate from above and from down so let's say we need the political level and we need also uh that people have an interest in um i hear my sound is very weak so i try to put it better um so i think we need these both parts uh politic politics and uh the convincing of the people uh that this is or could be uh a solution a solution or at least a way uh to fight poverty and to guarantee uh a welfare life for people uh that we don't uh put it in in connection with it has to have work or not work because work as you said already is not the part which is guaranteeing that uh that this gives a suitable life for everyone if you have work this is not fighting against poverty okay so thanks for these two things i just want because of the time also i would like to open the floor because i have a more general question but if there is a concrete question to the situation what both of them have described um and i see there is one uh what role does a regulation of living costs uh example rent caps controls and reducing power of private companies in public life have to play ensuring ubi could be effective in reducing inequality so i don't know who wants from you too wants to say something to this question maybe you well uh i'd like to say something about um that health staff that was asked before yeah if possible um because um well if even uh yeah first uh well it was taken into account physical health mental health self-perceived health asleep deprivation and the use of health care services okay and even if it was expected that uh those families in the treatment group would improve their health and reduce their use of health services the reality was that there were no changes in this sense all right so contrary to expectations uh improvements in the individual well-being dimension that was seen doesn't necessarily translate into better health outcomes so trends um are very clear uh seen that for example there was no effect in the probability of having a serious health problem or um there are for example significant changes in self-perceived health so we know that poor self-perceived health is a very strong predictor of lower life satisfaction in fact it's estimated that those people who report being in poor health have on average 0.8 points lower levels of life satisfaction than the rest and just to finish one of the most remarkable results in the experiment is that that program that pilot um had no effect on the risk of developing uh mental health related problems so the effect goes in the expected direction there is uh generally negative sign has a negative correlation so it reduces the probability of affecting mental health but it's not statistically significant so these results and that's why it's remarkable differs from the preliminary results where a significant reduction of nine points uh nine percentage point points in the risk of mental illness was detected so this reversal of the trend has two possible explanations one it's that the effect on mental health uh it's very short-term effect and the second one which is more likely I think it's that in the last phase of the survey of the program the effects of the program have uh began to to disappear in that expectation on the on the end of the BEMI income so that could be also that time limitation uh the staff and maybe because of that it's not statistically statistically significant thank you very much and and I hope Reinhardt this is fine with you for for your question you have asked before and coming back to the other question Mike you want to to say something about the question of Ruby yes and maybe just continue on that um it's interesting that in in Finland and in Dutch cities and their evaluations they actually find yet quite low impacts which itself is interesting because a lot of the critics of basic income would say people won't work they'll sit around they'll become unhealthy and they won't look for jobs that that wasn't what they found and there were some positive impacts in both of those but they were particularly positive whether additional support given so helping people to look for work tended to have beneficial effects for those who were on basic income so and in the same way we've never we've never claimed that basic income was the panacea that would solve everything um so we've had two quite extensive sets of workshops the second was actually on mental health and basic income which we reported on earlier this year um but the first one we looked at basic income and various aspects of life one of which was housing and we worked with homeless people and housing charities and and we decided that um basic income wouldn't solve our housing crisis houses will solve our housing crisis and controls on rents will and so on so other things been equal if you just give some people this basic income it might lead to house inflation even more or rents being put up by landlords by owners of houses for rent and and therefore said we need complementary things to go alongside a basic income which we should be doing anyway such as rent controls more housing helping homeless people to come off the streets and in many cases deal with their mental health issues and drug problems and so on and so to answer that question yeah we we need these complementary policies strategies actions activities but we should be doing them anyway and I hope that answers yeah that's that's good what you say because I think uh well we you know we have these days the COP started in uh in Glasgow uh talking about trying to find an agreement on the climate change uh and to reduce the the the aspect of climate change at the same time we know that all what we are doing is not there is not a magic solution for something it's only it's the possibility or it's the the the necessity of to have different uh tools which can face different parts of the problem in generally the problem is a big one yes and we can take it into small phases but we can with no one tool we will not solve not the climate change not the health situation not the housing system anyway the UBI is a part of maybe a solution and this is I think this is important to point it out and to to have to have it clear that when we talk about it this is one of of a lot of measures we need in this and what what is necessarily and just coming back to to the situation in Scotland where I think okay on one hand on one hand you have the you have the blocking of the of the government of the UK government and you cannot decide about to have a pilot on this because one of my questions was now what is also not helping the UK and not Scotland was the idea do we need something like a European pilot uh uh do we need a pilot which is uh and I don't want to talk there about Europe and Brexit and so on but it is what what I think what is one point of the pilots is we we have different realities in the countries yes but we are also testing different points so it makes it for a long and and I think Julian you you know it better because you have seen all the different pilots it makes it complicated to compare them and to bring some really uh to bring really the UBI as a tool for a solution of one aspect so the point is do we maybe need something uh what takes the uh a pilot which takes the national situation into account but to have comparable uh uh criterias for what we can what we when at least can you can use in the European uh and UK area for the for the same time maybe you use you tell us your ideas about this question before we close our our webinar on this yeah well I think uh a European UBI um no project a European UBI could be really really beneficial for us um for different different aspects but of course uh guaranteeing the material existence of everybody in the European Union or in the European continent whatever it means and could be really really beneficial for everybody it could give us also freedom that we don't have right now it could help also to make that European integration into something really tangible really we can see it not as we have right now the European Union it could also give us some um be um I'm sorry how to say uh sentiment of pertinencia a feeling of uh belonging belonging to the European Union we've got a project that people don't belong part of it of that project a UBI could make that it could also help us to stop that that um brain drain I mean capital going from one country to another because they have no opportunities in their country and of course it could make us also uh fiscal transferences from one country to another but that's the European Union I mean if you want to be in the European Union you know that the European Union goes to that uh role sand principle of maximine and that's what's happened and yeah I think that's enough for the moment before I'm going to up okay thank you Mike you also want to say something yeah just brief yeah the idea of solidarity and so forth um and we see it most strongly in in the north and the west of Europe um and and the those who were in the the European Union for longer actually appreciate the solidarity more than perhaps the accession states who are still struggling with legacies and there are there is a petition to the European Parliament I believe is across the whole of Europe and people trying to sign up from each country there are also plans for a world UBI which would vary by country and the United Nations has published plans for the whole of Latin America for instance and and if if if you think in in the invasion of Afghanistan one of the reasons was to stop opium being created it didn't take much money you know to persuade farmers to come out of growing poppies into food stuffs and those who are burning the Amazon forest to feed their families to get money they're not getting a lot of money a basic income would give them an alternative um which would and so forth so that's why I said it's important it should be on the table at COP26 again it's for solidarity across the world because people across the world particularly the poor are those most affected by climate change thank you very much both of you and yes if it will be on the table of the COP26 we will see but at least it's on the table of the green hub you can find in the COP which is organized together with different organ green organization and big part of this is also the green European foundation where we try to put this issue of UBI also on the table and to to bring it up there and as it was mentioned also in the chat there is going on still a European citizen initiative on UBI so where you still can sign you can find it in the in the in the chat but before we close here we a lot of what we have talked about now and what you have what what was the base of of this debate today the pilots you can find this in our in our online course and we would like to give you a short view into it if now my colleague's sharing the screen what we cannot hear okay it doesn't it doesn't matter we cannot hear it but as you see it's an interactive online course where you find the examples of pilots in the different countries and where we try to collect it so it's one part of of what we are facing in the in the online course have a look on it we want to try to get the information together to gather it and to spread it more so thank you first of all for the two speakers here we as Jeff we will follow up with this issue in the next in the next years and hopefully we'll see we all will see that UBI will be part of our reality in the future thank you very much to all of you thank you thank you very much for being with us okay bye bye thank you bye bye everybody bye