Amid the tax credits furore and the Tory climbdown at the Autumn Statement, there was much talk of how inefficient and complicated the system is.

And it is, along with the rest of the UK’s hotchpotch of benefits, personal taxes and minimum wage law: bureaucratically expensive and, for the individual, confusing and often humiliating.

Economics textbooks tell us that a good tax is one that’s fair, adequate, simple, transparent and efficient – in terms both of administrative ease and of a minimal distortion to incentives and productive efficiency.

There’s not many taxes in the UK that would score very highly on more than a couple of those criteria, and indeed it’s difficult to construct taxes that meet them all, as some are pretty much mutually exclusive.

Making tax credits simple and efficient as well as fair was an impossible task: they were designed to paper over cracks in the existing network of taxes, benefits and wage law.

A system that, like any other built by gradual accretion and haphazard tinkering over centuries, scores poorly on most of our counts.

Beyond replacing tax credits with something else that could be crowbarred into the current framework, radical suggestions on tax and benefit reform have been in short supply, from both left and right.

Certainly there were few people trumpeting a guaranteed, universal basic income that all receive regardless of pay from work.

This is an idea that has been batted around university lecture halls for decades but it is starting to gain some real-world traction as technological advances threaten to replace human labour in many roles.

Massive and imminent structural changes in the labour market are, as much as ageing of the population and inadequate pensions saving, the elephant in the economy's room.

Unlikely bedfellows: Green Party leader Natalie Bennett and deceased godfather of monetarism Milton Friedman.

A guaranteed income is on the face of it a policy that would not sit well with those on the laissez-faire, small state, rightist end of the political economy spectrum - and indeed it is a favourite with the Green Party.

But it is actually pretty much the same thing as a negative income tax – a system propounded by Milton Friedman and other economic libertarians, largely for its simplicity and efficiency.

Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila has praised the idea of a universal basic income.

Sam Bowman at the Adam Smith Institute explains that NIT is ‘a form of welfare that replaces most existing welfare schemes with a single payment that supplements the income of the unemployed and low-paid’.

‘The payment is withdrawn as your earnings increase, ideally at a gradual enough rate that increasing your earnings (and hence reducing leisure time) is always worthwhile,' he adds.

A universal basic income is slightly different in that everyone receives the same amount from the state and higher earners pay it back in tax – but constructed in particular ways, the two systems give almost identical outcomes in terms of benefits received and revenues raised.

The argument then resides in which is the most efficient. And of course in what constitutes a suitable, and affordable, basic minimum income.

All pie in the sky many might think – but not to the Finnish authorities it isn’t.

Finland’s centre-right government recently confirmed it will go ahead with a €20billion two-year universal income experiment to see how it works.

Will it provide a disincentive to low–paid work? Or will low-paid jobs become more attractive because all earned income is kept? Will mums stay at home? Is it affordable? Would a negative income tax do a better job?

A bit like big transport and infrastructure schemes, wholesale tax and benefits reform is not attractive to Government because it will be a lengthy and controversial process, the benefits of which will not be seen in its Parliamentary lifetime.

While George Osborne did create the Office for Tax Simplification in 2010, you would be forgiven for wondering what it's been up to since then.

It now has a new chief in the form of Angela Knight, former Treasury minister and more recently the public relations face of the banking and energy sectors. Not someone afraid to take on a tricky job then.