How free are people when they cannot afford housing, food, healthcare or the basic conditions of a dignified life?

 

Economic security is a necessary condition for human dignity, autonomy and meaningful participation in society⁷⁰¹. Freedom has limited practical value when people lack sufficient food, housing, energy, healthcare, education or the stability needed to organize their lives. The proposed reform would therefore turn social security from a general policy objective into a combination of enforceable minimum protection and continuing institutional responsibility.

The proposed framework has three layers. First, an immediately enforceable floor protects the material conditions without which dignity and basic agency collapse. Second, duties of progressive realization require institutions to improve accessibility, adequacy, and coverage using available resources and to justify serious regression. Third, above those requirements, elected institutions retain broad discretion over benefits, taxation, public provision, regulation, and administrative organization⁷⁰².

The need for stronger protection follows partly from the changing nature of social and economic risk⁷⁰³. Existing welfare systems were largely designed around stable employment, predictable income and clearly defined periods of unemployment, illness or retirement. Contemporary lives are more varied. Temporary work, platform labor, self-employment, fluctuating earnings, informal care responsibilities and changing household structures create risks that do not fit traditional categories. Climate change, housing shortages, rising energy costs, digitalization and economic shocks add further uncertainty.

Poverty is also rarely an isolated shortage of income⁷⁰⁴. Financial problems interact with debt, health, housing insecurity, administrative complexity and social exclusion. A small loss of income can generate arrears, collection costs, sanctions and repayment demands, creating a cycle in which insecurity becomes progressively harder to escape. People may remain above an official poverty threshold while having insufficient disposable income because of high housing costs, healthcare expenses, debt or unpredictable earnings.

Economic security must therefore be assessed through people’s actual circumstances rather than nominal income alone. Two households receiving the same income may have very different abilities to meet essential needs. A meaningful minimum must consider unavoidable costs, household composition, disability, care responsibilities and access to affordable services⁷⁰⁵. It must also provide sufficient stability and predictability to withstand ordinary financial shocks. The minimum should be determined through a public method combining reference budgets, actual prices, regional costs, household composition, disability- and care-related needs, service availability, and the experience of affected people. An independent body may calculate and advise, but Parliament should adopt the standard, state its assumptions, and review it at fixed intervals. Courts should test whether the adopted floor is evidence-based, non-discriminatory, and capable of protecting essential conditions rather than select a national budget themselves.

Income protection alone is insufficient⁷⁰⁶. Essential services must be available, affordable, accessible and of adequate quality. Additional financial support cannot solve a shortage of suitable housing, unavailable medical care or the absence of an appropriate school. Social security consequently requires both sufficient personal resources and reliable public institutions.

A constitutional assessment should therefore identify whether the failure concerns purchasing power, the supply of a service, its geographic availability, its quality, or an inaccessible procedure. Cash may compensate for some costs but cannot cure the absence of housing, healthcare, education, or supported access. Conversely, nominal service availability does not protect dignity when fees, transport, waiting time, or administrative barriers make it unusable.

Housing is central because it supports safety, privacy, family life, employment, education and healthcare. Healthcare is inseparable from economic security because poverty and insecurity can cause illness, while illness can reduce income and increase necessary expenditure. Education affects personal development and future opportunities, while social and cultural participation prevents isolation and enables democratic involvement. These fields require their own protection because their quality and availability cannot be reduced to income policy.

The reform would establish a directly protected minimum below which no one may be pushed⁷⁰⁷. That minimum should be determined through legislation informed by transparent evidence on essential needs and reviewed periodically through democratic procedures. Judicial protection would focus on exclusion below the established floor, discrimination, arbitrary regression, failure to consider cumulative effects, and the absence of a reasoned and lawful response to urgent hardship. Courts would protect the minimum and the integrity of the decision process without selecting the complete design of taxation, benefits, housing, healthcare, or education. This minimum would cover the resources and services necessary for food, shelter, energy, personal care, communication, essential healthcare, basic education and elementary participation in society. It would serve as a constitutional safety net when ordinary legislation, administrative errors or the interaction of multiple systems leaves someone without the conditions of a dignified life.

Sanctions, recovery, deductions, and public debt collection should remain lawful only when their cumulative effect preserves the dignified minimum⁷⁰⁸. Decision-makers should consider the legal basis, culpability, proportionality, ability to pay, duration, prior administrative error, and effects on children or dependents. Fraud control does not justify hunger, homelessness, interruption of essential care, or automatic recovery from a person who could not reasonably understand or prevent the error. Any departure from the ordinary recovery rule should be reasoned and reviewable.

Responsibilities would be layered rather than unlimited. Immediate protection would apply when the dignified minimum is threatened. Above that floor, government would retain substantial freedom to develop social protection gradually, set priorities and allocate public resources. It could choose among benefits, taxation, public services, regulated private provision and decentralized administration. Courts would safeguard the constitutional minimum and address serious structural failures, but they would not determine general benefit levels, healthcare budgets, housing programs or the design of the education system.

Social protection may be redesigned in response to changing needs, evidence, or fiscal conditions. A measure that deliberately and substantially reduces existing protection should nevertheless trigger a structured justification⁷⁰⁹: the objective must be sufficiently important; distributional and cumulative effects must be assessed; less harmful alternatives must be considered; the dignified minimum and non-discrimination must remain protected; and the burden should not be shifted disproportionately to groups with the least capacity to absorb it. The test evaluates justification, not whether every benefit remains unchanged.

A stronger constitutional framework would also expose the cumulative effects of policy⁷¹⁰. A benefit reduction, higher healthcare contribution and rising housing costs may each appear defensible when considered separately but together push a household below the minimum. Legislators and public authorities would therefore have to assess the interaction of different measures, not merely the effects of their own individual programs.

This would have important consequences for the organization of government. Responsibilities are currently divided among national government, municipalities, benefit agencies, healthcare organizations, housing providers, schools and private contractors. Such specialization may provide expertise and local flexibility, but it can also cause citizens to be repeatedly redirected while no institution assumes responsibility for the overall outcome⁷¹¹. The reform would require clear coordination, recognizable points of contact and effective correction when errors spread across organizational or data chains.

Social protection would become more preventive. Institutions would need to monitor non-use of benefits, payment interruptions, waiting lists, regional inequalities and recurring administrative failures. Complaints, appeals and frontline experience should be used to identify system-wide problems. Once a structural error is established, comparable cases should be corrected proactively rather than requiring every affected person to begin a separate procedure.

Where suspension or recovery creates a credible risk to essential living conditions, institutions should maintain an interim minimum until the dispute has been decided, unless immediate continuation would create a serious and demonstrable countervailing harm. Emergency contact points should be able to coordinate across agencies, and correction of one data error should propagate to all connected decisions. Continuity is not immunity from later adjustment; it prevents procedural delay from becoming material deprivation.

People affected by social policies also need a greater role in designing and evaluating them. Their experience can reveal inaccessible procedures, unrealistic obligations and interactions between schemes that administrative data fail to capture. Participation would complement professional and political judgment without replacing democratic responsibility. Authorities would remain responsible for final decisions but would need to explain how relevant experience was considered.

Independent monitoring would strengthen public accountability. Government and Parliament should receive regular information about whether the minimum remains adequate, which groups are excluded, whether services are genuinely accessible and where protection is deteriorating.

Monitoring must lead to a reasoned institutional response rather than another series of reports without corrective action⁷¹².

The reforms would require significant investment. Benefits and services may need adjustment, while information systems, staffing, legal assistance, monitoring and inter-agency coordination would have to improve. Reliable data, human review and understandable procedures are essential. Without adequate funding and administrative capacity, stronger constitutional language could remain symbolic or create additional litigation without solving the underlying problems.

Implementation should therefore begin with the most urgent risks: protecting the minimum, preventing sanctions and debt collection from destroying essential living conditions, safeguarding children and dependents and avoiding interruptions in income, housing, healthcare or education. Broader simplification, digital reform and institutional redesign could follow in stages. Phasing should support implementation rather than postpone immediate protection.

Implementation should begin with four verifiable commitments: a publicly determined dignified minimum; continuity of essential income and services during disputes; cumulative-effects assessment for major reforms; and proactive correction of systemic errors⁷¹³. Monitoring should report non-take-up, interruptions, sanctions, waiting times, regional gaps, successful remedies, and groups falling below the floor. Courts would protect the minimum, equality, fair procedure, and justified non-regression, while Parliament would remain responsible for financing and the broader welfare-state design. This division converts social rights into enforceable responsibility without constitutionalizing one policy model.

 

 

 

701 UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment No. 19: The Right to Social Security, E/C.12/GC/19 (2008), paras. 1–3,

https://docstore.ohchr.org/SelfServices/FilesHandler.ashx?enc=yfZzQ2IoBpUq%2FRs%2F%2FC7cegZ9FYG4JLwrHqMr N0RU0Mz616udSLXQEPC6Avxp6Xla0pz0qUAHEepNM9nnnyKY1w%3D%3D

702 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, arts. 2(1), 9, and 11, https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-economic-social-and-cultural-rights; UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment No. 3, E/1991/23 (1990).

703 International Labour Organization, World Social Protection Report 2024–26: Universal Social Protection for Climate Action and a Just Transition (Geneva: ILO, 2024); OECD, Society at a Glance 2024 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2024).

704 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sabina Alkire et al., Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

705 Jonathan Bradshaw, ed., Budget Standards for the United Kingdom (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993); Abigail Davis et al., A Minimum Income Standard for the United Kingdom in 2024 (Loughborough: Centre for Research in Social Policy, 2024).

706 European Social Charter (Revised), arts. 11–14, 30, and 31; Council of Europe, European Social Charter portal,

https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-social-charter.

707 International Labour Organization, Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202); UN CESCR, General Comment No. 19, paras. 59 and 91–98.

708 European Court of Human Rights, Larioshina v. Russia, App. No. 56869/00, Decision of 23 April 2002; Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2018).

709 UN CESCR, General Comment No. 19, paras. 42 and 64; Letter of the Chairperson of the CESCR on austerity measures, 16 May 2012; Aoife Nolan, Economic and Social Rights after the Global Financial Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

710 UN CESCR, General Comment No. 19, paras. 67–76, on strategies, monitoring, indicators, and benchmarks; OECD, Framework for Integrated Policy Analysis in social protection and distributional assessment.

711 Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon, ‘Destabilization Rights: How Public Law Litigation Succeeds,’ Harvard Law Review 117, no. 4 (2004): 1015–1101.

712 UN CESCR, General Comment No. 19, paras. 74–76; Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2012).

713 Venice Commission, Rule of Law Checklist, 2nd ed., CDL-AD(2025)002, https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2025)002-e; European Commission, 2026 Rule of Law Report, COM(2026) 900 final.

 

 

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