Universal Credit Jobs (UCJ) is the simplest credible version of a Job Guarantee that can be delivered in the United Kingdom.
It achieves the core macroeconomic objectives of a stabilisation system: eliminating involuntary unemployment while anchoring inflation, by transforming the existing Universal Credit system into offers of employment at the minimum wage for any claimant willing and able to work.
The scheme exploits the existing legal and operational infrastructure. It allows designated public-purpose employers (charities, the NHS, local authorities, and similar bodies) to offer full-time roles with a zero gross wage cost to the employer. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) automatically tops up the worker’s Universal Credit with a new non-tapered “Minimum Wage Guarantee” element, delivering the full net minimum wage directly to the claimant.
UCJ is a powerful automatic stabiliser: it expands in downturns, contracts in booms, and varies regionally with local labour-market conditions. By shifting macroeconomic stabilisation from the money market to the labour market, it frees the Bank of England from having to use interest-rate hikes to create unemployment. Interest rates can be left to settle at their natural low level, cutting mortgage and rental costs for millions of households.
The policy is exceptionally light-touch: it requires only two Statutory Instruments, no primary legislation, no new agencies, and no open-ended powers. Implementation costs are modest, conservatively £100 million one-off and under £50 million annually, which is less than the current cost of running the Monetary Policy Committee and the Debt Management Office.
The entire package remains one of the least legislatively demanding transformational reforms in recent decades and can be delivered easily within a single Parliament.
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