A village in Switzerland plans to pay residents almost £2,000 a month for doing nothing as an experiment into an unconditional basic income.

Rheinau, on the Rhine river at the border with Germany, hopes to pay participants up to 2,500 Swiss francs (£1,970) a month to ensure they have a guaranteed income whether they work or not.

The village council decided to go ahead with the scheme after more than half of Rheinau’s 1,300 inhabitants signed up to take part, and efforts to secure funding will now begin.

The experiment comes after Switzerland overwhelmingly rejected proposals for a nationwide basic income in a referendum two years ago.

But unlike the national proposals, the Rheinau scheme will not be funded by the taxpayer. Instead the village plans to raise the necessary money through crowdfunding.

The project is the brainchild of Rebecca Panian, a Swiss film-maker who says she was inspired by the rejected national scheme.

“The idea, and the new social system that would go with it, made sense to me,” Ms Panian says on the scheme’s website.