That this House takes note of the case for Her Majesty’s Government to use wellbeing as a key indicator of national performance when setting budgets, deciding policy priorities and reviewing the effectiveness of policy goals.
My Lords, I am delighted to open this debate on the case for the Government to use well-being as a key indicator of national performance when setting budgets, deciding policy priorities and reviewing the effectiveness of policy goals. It is a debate of growing salience both overseas and in this country and one that cuts across a wide range of interests for many noble Lords speaking today, including health, the environment, the world of work, education, transport, housing, community, culture and the arts, sport and leisure—the list goes on. I am very much looking forward to hearing the contributions from all noble Lords.
I should say at the outset that I feel it is right that, while Parliament and the whole nation are having to face up to the immense and immediate challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, we pause, however briefly, to consider the long-term well-being of the nation. While it is a timely debate, it is in fact not a new one. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy famously said that measuring a country’s GDP accounts for
“everything … except that which makes life worthwhile”,
highlighting that the orthodox approach included
“air pollution and cigarette advertising”
and “napalm and nuclear warheads”, but failed to account for
“the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play”
or
“the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages”.
Since then, a growing number of economists and academics have argued that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we measure economic and social progress. Indeed, leading academics such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz suggest that measuring people’s well-being is important for determining priorities in public policy, rather than focusing solely on gross domestic product. It is a stance gaining some prominence as Governments and businesspeople alike have joined the chorus suggesting that we reconsider how we evaluate our success as a society and how decisions are made about how public money is spent between competing priorities.
So what do we mean when we discuss well-being? Typically, well-being relates to a set of different ways of measuring quality of life and human flourishing which takes account of the broad spectrum of human needs rather than looking only at economic measures. It is about how individuals evaluate their lives and what really matters to them.
The picture that emerges in the UK is one in which well-being, for too many, is perilously low. Indeed, based on the well-being index set up by the former Prime Minister David Cameron back in 2010, the Office for National Statistics recently reported a fall in both life satisfaction and the feeling that things done in life are worth while. That was according to its most recent February bulletin. Furthermore, the same bulletin reported elevated anxiety at the end of 2019, with around 10.6 million people reporting high levels of anxiety. This of course chimes with current concerns over rising levels of poor mental health.
My Lords, I really welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness on securing it. As she said, this is a timely moment to consider the fundamental question of what the objective of government is, because that should be reflected in the spending review. In my view, the well-being of the people is the only really sensible objective. As Thomas Jefferson said:
“The care of human life and happiness … is the first and only legitimate objective of good government.”
I cannot think of any other equally defensible objective—provided that we also include the fairness with which the happiness and well-being is distributed.
What reason do we have to hope that the Government will follow this? The reason is that it is in the self-interest of the Government to follow it. There is now a massive volume of research on what determines the outcome of elections, and study after study shows that if you want to explain the share of the popular vote, it is better explained through the well-being of the people than through all the economic variables that we use and assume are the main influences upon it. Whereas Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy, stupid” that determines elections, actually “It’s well-being, stupid.”
Let me press this point. One does not easily change the direction of the Government without appealing to their self-interest. The reason people vote the way they do is not surprising, because it reflects what matters to people. When we study the factors explaining the variation of happiness and well-being across the population, we find that economic factors play quite a small role. Unemployment is, of course, very serious, but it affects a relatively small number of people. Income explains only about 1% of the variation in happiness of the British population, and the same is true in most European countries. We can explain another 20% by measuring mental and physical health; those come top. Then, there are all the various human relationships we are involved in—family relationships, work relationships—and the quality of those relationships, at work and in the community. So it is in the Government’s interest to fundamentally rethink their priorities. First, they must change the methodology, as the noble Baroness said, and then change the policies in consequence. I shall say just a word about the methodology.
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, has given us the opportunity to question assumptions and to think through an important question. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, set it out very well when he said that a prime object of government should be the well-being and happiness of people. Although Thomas Jefferson wrote very well about these things, he did not practise them to quite the same extent.
The problem comes in trying to devise metrics to place alongside GDP. GDP may be an inadequate measure of the well-being of the country, but to find metrics to place alongside it is really quite difficult. Whatever the deficiencies of measuring GDP, it is an important indicator of the size and distribution of the cake. It is reinforced by other statistics we have on unemployment and employment, longevity rates, crime rates, divorce rates and all the rest of it. We are not without means of testing the temperature of the country and the well-being of its people.
We need some other value-based, non-statistical criterion against which to test policy proposals and their likely or possible consequences, as well as providing an additional means to assess the state of society. I believe that had those existed in 2010, the Government might not have pursued their austerity programme with quite the disregard for some of the consequences as they did. That austerity programme was a classic example of making balancing the books the primary object of policy, rather than seeing it as one of a number of means to achieve the goal of national well-being. To that extent, it was therefore based on a fundamental error.
This brings me to the question of what the other criteria should be, and I see three particular problems. First, any list of those criteria is likely to reflect the political bias of those who draw it up, so that it is unlikely to be universally shared. Even when one looks at a particular item, such as inequality, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, drew attention, one has only to read the numerous reviews of Thomas Piketty’s latest book to see how very differently people interpret the question of inequality and the extent to which it matters. There are big definitional problems.
My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, on introducing this important debate. I will comment briefly on three aspects: the developing international consensus that well-being should become a key indicator of national performance; ways in which obstacles to further progress can be overcome; and current opportunities for the Government to promote this application both here and abroad.
Even in theory, let alone as a desirable political deployment, well-being has always been slightly suspect, such as the reference of Epicurus to happiness as the only good. Picking up the reins later on with utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham may have been a bit more convincing, but there was still the challenge of demonstrating how something as private as well-being could ever be much assisted within the necessary nuts-and-bolts machinery of a working economy. In view of this apparent inconsistency, although he and Mill remained staunch advocates of collective human well-being, there came to be the joke rhyme pretending that the latter might have become tempted to change horses all the same:
“John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.”
Nevertheless, within OECD countries in recent years there has been a growing consensus for well-being to take a central role. One explanation for this shift of opinion is the recognition that, however subjective, its effects can still be fairly easily measured over a number of different fields, including health, education, relationships, personal activities and so on. Another explanation is the understanding that GDP and well-being indicators do not have to conflict with one another. Instead, they can be complementary.
Influencing this new thinking has been the work of the French Government’s Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission, to which my noble friend Lord Tugendhat just referred. It published its first report in 2009. Shortly afterwards came the OECD’s Better Life Index. I used both sets of helpful criteria as evidence in writing a recent report on this subject for the Council of Europe.
12:57 pm
The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth
My Lords, I begin by humbly making two recommendations of ways in which your Lordships might profitably spend their time.
The first is to visit Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, where the nations historic naval hardware is on display. It is the stuff of national myth: from the “Mary Rose” to HMS “Victory” to HMS “Warrior”. Beyond them, visitors can see one or sometimes both of the Royal Navy’s latest, hugely powerful expressions of British sea power: the great aircraft carriers HMS “Queen Elizabeth” and “Prince of Wales”. These great ships, old and new, represent projections of hard power, but what often speaks more powerfully to those visiting the dockyard is the soft side to life on board: the story, how people lived their lives, their feelings, aspirations, hopes and fears—their well-being.
It seems to me that this exemplifies the challenge faced by policymakers and any assessment of how well, and if, a policy has worked: whether it has produced the desired outcome. Crunching the numbers is one way, but what policy looks and feels like in Whitehall and Westminster can be very different from the feelings and experience of those it directly affects. I am not arguing for the warm and fluffy against objective measures; as an economist in an earlier life, I cannot. I am arguing for voices and experience to be used in how we measure well-being—for soft and hard data.
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on securing this debate and on her involvement in the excellent work of the APPG that informs our debate. I read the chapters of the group’s reports on young people with particular interest. This leads me to my second recommendation, which is to direct your Lordships to the letters page of the current Church Times. In it, there is a letter from my right reverend friend the Bishop of Derby to which I am a co-signatory. This makes a compelling case for the Government to measure children’s well-being on a national level, a case informed by the Children’s Society’s excellent Good Childhood Report for 2019, the latest in these annual publications. They should be required reading for policymakers.
The report makes salutary and sobering reading. Girls and now boys are increasingly unhappy with their appearance. Many struggle with their friendships and are unhappy at school. These long-term trends are often the result of societal pressures, which cause worry, tension and stress. It is also clear that, for these young people, well-being is not just about being “happy”. It is about how they can be satisfied with their lives, feel listened to, be optimistic about the future and develop resilience to cope with life’s ups and downs. It is about stronger relationships between parents or carers, and children; it is about better local neighbourhoods; it is about good physical and mental health.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on securing this debate today. I would like to plug what I am doing tomorrow, which is introducing the Second Reading of my Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill. It was very peculiar for me when we started to talk about future generations. I could understand entirely the idea that we should not create laws and do things now that, in 10, 20 or 30 years, will cause all sorts of problems—the laws of unintended consequences—bearing in mind that this House, and the other place, are full of attempts to reverse the mistakes made in former times.
When we looked at the idea of a future generations Bill, lo and behold, around the corner came my staff and they added on the “Wellbeing”. Unfortunately, I did not understand it, because I had never really thought about well-being. The reason that I had never really thought about it was that I thought it was a bourgeois trap—one of the kind of things that you do when you want to avoid talking about the real world of work, the real world of class and the real fact that in the world you have people with too much GDP and others with not enough. You could put it another way: you could say that well-being is out there, but there are some people who have too much of it and some people who do not have enough of it.
One of the problems for me is that, when I look at the world, because I am a very old git—I am 74 now —I have passed through this tremendous 70-year change and have seen people from the working classes and middle classes getting more and more complex in their needs. It is not enough simply to be alive, be healthy and have loads of fun: you have to have well-being and happiness. I find that a very difficult thing: I am struggling with it and I am willing to go to evening classes to learn about how I can stop looking at well-being as a kind of chimera of not facing up to the real issues.
When I was 18 years of age, I was blessed by Her Majesty’s prisons allowing me to leave custody and go to Chelsea School of Art. When I went there, my well-being went through the roof: it was absolutely enormous. At the same time, my parents moved into another council flat, where their well-being also went through the roof. I am trying to make the same point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat: well-being is assessed in the context of where you are looking at it from and what position you hold in society. It is not something you can just leave to chance. I would love to kick the concept around, look at it very carefully and ask if it is a ruse or something that we can actually measure. Is it something that we can bring to our children and say, “Actually, simple financial advantage is really only a basis on which you can build change”?
My Lords, it is an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I wish his Bill—the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill—every success. I will talk about something that has transformed my own well-being and that of thousands of others; it has a great contribution to make in practically every field of government.
My life changed about seven or eight years ago, when an email arrived from my colleague Jo Swinson inviting us to come along on a short course on something called “mindfulness”. Jo talked about how it had helped her to cope with the challenges of being an MP and enabled her to feel much happier in herself. In those days, your Lordships would have seen a very different woman before you from the one that you see today. I was depressed and I did not realise it; only when I came out of that depression did I realise what a bad place, emotionally and mentally, I had been in. I was very underconfident and saw life as a difficult challenge every single day, but I was keen to find potential tools to help. The effect that the mindfulness course had on me was transformational, and this is why.
So many of us live in our heads. We tell ourselves stories about how the world is, and that shapes our perceptions, our mood and our abilities. It is a series of messages that play again and again in our minds. They repeat themselves over and over until they become embedded, and they shape our perceptions of the world. For me, the light-bulb moment was on the parliamentary mindfulness course—available to any noble Lord on Tuesdays in the early evening—when we were talking about how we see the world and the negative perceptions which we allow to rule us. “But these are only thoughts—they are not reality”, said the tutor. What? I had been giving myself a hard time for years and years. Mindfulness gives us the tools to remove ourselves from this perceived reality that we have built for ourselves and to watch thoughts processing before us without them taking us over.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for introducing this topic. However, for various reasons I am among the sceptics. I will make this short speech more technical than may be strictly welcome to other noble Lords—it may not add to your Lordships’ well-being, but I had better get it over with.
First, this is not new. As the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, said, this is where Bentham started, saying that the purpose of government was to secure the greatest good of the greatest number. We are now in this same logic, except that we are defining “good” in a different way. In those days—to make this story rather rapid— there was something called the welfare function. The Government had to maximise the social welfare function, which was the sum total of the utilities of individual citizens that they derived from various things like consumption. That was logical, and it also turned out that utility was such a peculiar thing that the higher the income, the lower the margin of utility of the extra dollar you got. It was no good to give money to the rich, so inequality turned out to be a bad thing for social welfare.
That led to a counter-reaction, especially from Lord Robbins, whom the noble Lord, Lord Layard, remembers, because he first put forward his brilliant analysis of happiness in the Lord Robbins memorial lecture. The thing is, you may be able to make a connection between say, income and well-being, but your well-being and my well-being may conflict. Well-being is not what we call aggregable—you cannot add up different people’s well-being. There might be the reaction: I may not like your happiness or your riches—I may feel unhappy that you are rich. What will you do about that? The idea was, “Let’s forget about those things and go to objective, measurable variables.”
The real question then arises. Suppose you had a measure of welfare, well-being, or whatever it is. Can government do anything to achieve it? What is the transmission mechanism between government policy and the outcome regarding well-being? Do only the Government cause well-being, or are they only one of the many actors that could promote well-being? Of course, they may not succeed—not every government policy succeeds, regardless of the Government’s intentions. Therefore this situation is not as simple as it looks. We can talk about well-being and it makes us feel good, and if we say that the Government ought to encourage well-being, who could object to that? The problem is whether this is a measurable variable and an achievable policy goal.
1:20 pm
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In 2018, the Intergenerational Foundation used well-being to measure the overall quality of life of young adults in the UK to evaluate improvements from one generation to the next. It found that, rather than improving over the last 20 years, overall well-being had declined by 10%. Satisfaction with well-being had fallen in terms of economics, relationships, health, personal environment and the sense of belonging.
Like other countries, we have historically focused on gross domestic product. However, while accounting for many things that are bad for us in health and other terms, GDP also fails to account for many things which are good for both people’s well-being and the economy. Very recently, journalist Jeremy Hazlehurst wrote about the importance of good metrics in the Work Magazine, identifying four main shortcomings of GDP. His framework provides a useful way of thinking how we can come up with improved and more rounded measures. First, he said that GDP is better at measuring goods and services, having originated to capture value derived from the manufacturing industry; I am sure I do not have to remind any noble Lord of the role that services play in our economy—approximately 80%. Secondly, it quantifies without having anything to say on quality. Thirdly, it is a so-called offline measure, which fails to account for time and money saved by online services, such as booking a rail ticket online. Finally, it deals in averages. This final point is crucial. In an era of increased inequality, GDP fails to capture wealth distribution and gaps in well-being. As we know, societies with the largest discrepancies between the rich and the poor tend to have higher levels of crime and exhibit much less trust and social cohesion. Unfortunately, we are failing to combat this trend of rising inequality. Only last week, a rise in income inequality was reported by the Financial Times, with the average
“disposable income for the poorest fifth of people”
having fallen by 4.3%. It is also worth pointing out that survey evidence shows that a lack of money is a strong predictor of low well-being, but the relationship between money and well-being drops dramatically as incomes rise. I do not suggest we dismiss GDP entirely; it has and will continue to be an important measurement for average growth across the country. Rather, my argument today is that additional and more qualitative measures are needed to help generate a richer debate. While growth can be a useful metric for economic success, we must ask ourselves other questions. What is the purpose of our economic policy? What is the overall goal of government policy? Are there limits to sustainable growth? What do we do with growth? Surely our goal should be to maximise the well-being of our citizens.
The case for measuring well-being is, in part, an economic one. Understanding well-being can help policymakers make public spending more effective at improving the lives of our fellow citizens. If we understand measurements of well-being, we can better understand where to direct public spending. In this sense, we can think of well-being measurement as a means for improved return on investment. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, is highly distinguished and a global authority on this issue, and it has been my absolute pleasure to work with him for a number of years on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. He has suggested that the Government should evaluate improvement in well-being for every pound they spend, so I very much look forward to hearing his contribution today, which I do not have to wait long for.
Far from being an unaffordable luxury, well-being data has the potential to improve the effectiveness of public spending and, in some cases, save public money. As the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell—another collaborator on the all-party group and leading expert in this area, who is unable to be in his place today—said, in May 2019,
“we need to understand that some of the big issues, such as improving air quality, are things that may not show up in pounds, shillings and pence. But it will show up by making our children healthier. You get long-term gains that give you a long-term fiscal gain as well”.
I would be remiss not to mention the importance of measuring children’s well-being specifically. A recent report from the Children’s Society found that an estimated 219,000 children across the UK are unhappy with their lives. Children’s happiness with their school and friends is declining, and the UK ranks 40th of 44 countries in the OECD’s PISA rankings for children’s well-being. We know so much more about adult life satisfaction than that of children. My case today is that well-being measurement will not only allow us to inform decisions on where to direct money more efficiently but serve as a tool to understand the outcomes of specific policies. Without a reliable and comprehensive mechanism to collect this data, we will simply not make progress on this issue.
Research has told us that participation in the labour market is a path to life satisfaction. Indeed, good-quality work can build a sense of fulfilment and generate involvement in community that gives people a real sense of purpose. The reverse is also true for poor-quality work and insecure work: it produces low well-being. In this sense, economic progress and well-being are inextricably linked. It may sound trite, but a happy, healthier and satisfied society is also an economically productive one.
As I have just mentioned, well-being is also about fairness between generations, social groups and regions. A successful well-being economy would, for example, ensure sustainable growth. To bring this bang up to date, consider the trade-offs suggested in the Financial Times editorial on 2 March on regional inequalities in the UK. It argued that the current choice appeared to be stuck between a life in the economically dynamic south-east, where high housing costs generate anxiety and unhappiness, or moving to more affordable regions without the same economic opportunities.
Well-being seems highly relevant to the Government’s levelling-up agenda and surely could be used as one means of shifting the dial. I also stress a point made by the OECD’s How’s Life? 2020 report, which came out recently. It says that we must not only measure well-being today but identify the resources needed to sustain it. This is vital when we think about the case for capital investment. It should not just be about physical infrastructure, but should include human and social capital.
It is not just economists and academics who are making the case for well-being; I was really fascinated to read recently in the pages of the Financial Times that an American hedge fund manager, no less—not the kind of person I often quote—made the case for companies, both private and public, to measure well-being. He cited the example of PayPal, a company that chose to gauge the financial stress levels of hourly and call-centre employees. Upon finding that 60% had difficulties and struggled to make ends meet, wages were raised, healthcare costs were reduced, employees were designated as shareholders and financial education was promoted—metrics led to action. The simple question I ask today is: why would the Government not do the same?
Other Governments have been taking steps forward in well-being economics. Here in the UK, Scotland and Wales have become examples of the practical implementation of well-being through things like the Scotland Performs framework and the Well-being of Future Generations Act in Wales. Tomorrow, of course, we have the Second Reading of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to which I am very much looking forward to contributing. Further afield, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has set aside 4% of the national budget as a well-being budget for a sustainable and low-emissions economy, a reduction in child poverty and improvement in mental health. More recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada charged one of his Ministers with leading work within the Department of Finance to better incorporate quality-of-life measurements into government decision-making and budgeting in preparation for their budget. Surely we now have an opportunity to join close partners in the Commonwealth and beyond to be leaders in well-being.
We have just had a Budget that, for obvious reasons—and quite rightly—was dominated by measures to combat the impact of coronavirus. Another particularly noteworthy aspect was the Chancellor’s whacking great £640 billion capital investment in physical infrastructure over the next five years for things like building roads, bridges, housing, broadband and so on. But the Budget had little to say on building human and social capital and was sadly silent on social care, one of the greatest challenges of our time. We have another opportunity though coming up soon to focus on well-being and on human and social capital infrastructure in the forthcoming spending review, which looks at longer-term spending. What would a spending review focused more on well-being look like? Happily, the APPG on Wellbeing Economics, which I have been involved in since joining your Lordships’ House, last year produced a paper with recommendations on that in a wide range of areas, including mental illness, children and schools, entry into skilled employment, social care, community services and improved well-being at work.
The current approach encourages a damaging short-term approach. In practical terms, there is much that the Treasury—and indeed the whole of Whitehall—could do in the way it operates to shift the dial on well-being, including by publishing data on well-being, reviewing the Green Book rules on how spending is categorised, providing guidance and technical support to departments on how to categorise the impact of policy on well-being, and asking departments to justify their spending review bids in terms of impact on well-being relative to their cost. We could introduce well-being impact analyses into legislation and departmental business plans and we could have a national strategy for reducing well-being inequalities.
There is much that we could do, and I conclude by saying that well-being has the potential to reconnect people with politics and to create a shared vision for what society and the economy are for. It is not an add-on to be considered once economic policy objectives have been achieved; it offers a new approach to policy across the board and has the potential to make government more effective in improving people’s lives. I very much hope that, 50 years on, the spirit of Bobby Kennedy’s visionary insight can start to bear fruit in this country.
As we know, the Treasury is rethinking the Green Book, which is very helpful. We are told that it will now stress that when you have monetary measures of benefit, you should weight these according to the income of the beneficiary, because the extra money is more valuable to a poor person than to a rich person. That reweighting is going to benefit the north, which is why the Government are doing it. The more important point, looking to the longer term, is that it is not possible to measure in monetary terms the benefits of most public expenditure. You cannot put a monetary value on health, social care, child well-being, law and order, community services or redistribution of income; these are really important for people’s well-being. However, you can put a well-being value on the associated outcomes, because a science of well-being now makes this possible. We have to change the way the Treasury Green Book works, so that it combines the kind of thing it always did, weighted by income, with direct measures of well-being. That was to some extent foreshadowed in the way the Green Book was revised in 2018.
Well-being as a measure of output is not new to our system of government, because it has been used in the NHS for 20 years. The NHS authorises treatments only if they produce at least one quality-adjusted life year—QALY—for every £30,000 of expenditure. We want to apply this same general approach to all other fields of government expenditure. I tried applying that criterion to HS2, converting the monetary value into the equivalent well-being value through the well-being effects of money, and I found that HS2 produces only 1/40th of the benefits that would be required by the NHS from the same amount of spending.
We can get an integrated way of analysing these problems. Let us apply this lens of well-being fearlessly to all expenditure, and then we will see what priorities follow; much more for mental health, more for physical health, more for our social infrastructure. I beg the Chancellor to move from the obsession with physical infrastructure to the social infrastructure which has been so seriously cut, and which is crucial to our well-being.
As the noble Baroness said, this is a movement which will succeed; in the end, we will be doing this. The OECD and the European Union have already asked member Governments to analyse policy in this way, but only three countries have done it: New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland. They are all led by women, and they are all small. Surely it is the time for a large country, led by a large man, to do the same.
Secondly, priorities can change sharply in quite a short time. One has only to think how much more concerned people are now about the implications of climate change than they were just a very short time ago. It would loom much larger in any list now than it would have done even three or four years ago.
Thirdly, for many the biggest single threat to their sense of well-being is change itself—technical change and social change. The Government certainly have a duty to mitigate the effects of change where they are damaging and cause difficulties, but we cannot stop change. We cannot stop the world and get off. The extent to which change is itself a cause of unhappiness and detrimental to well-being is, like the rising and going down of the sun, one of those things.
I have come up with a very modest proposal for this stage of the debate. We in the UK could learn from the conclusions of the French Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission that was described in the excellent Library briefing for this debate. Such a multidimensional definition of well-being could provide a reference point against which policy proposals might be tested by both those putting them forward and those judging them. However, at this stage perhaps the most useful result of this debate and the efforts of the proponents of taking well-being into account in policy formation is that it promotes a wider national debate over the issues involved and on how to put GDP into a wider context.
I know that your Lordships will support me in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for his enormous contribution and vision in the wide field of well-being and its deployment.
In this country, we have benefited considerably from the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, set up by the coalition Government in 2014, whose report of last month illustrates significant achievements over the past six years covering mental health, community income and work.
For mental health, service and research investment are both undoubtedly improving. On community, there is now a cross-government strategy for loneliness and a Minister for the subject. Well-being at work has become a priority in a variety of sectors, with many large and medium-sized organisations currently adopting staff well-being projects.
Be that as it may, to continue sufficient momentum, a number of actions so far relatively neglected should be taken, such as those supported by, among others, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. They are those for the treatment of mental illness, well-being of children in schools, young people’s entry into skilled employment; and, concerning prisoners, rehabilitation, craft and skills acquisition, as well as improved mental health.
Does my noble friend the Minister agree that the Government should pay greater attention to those matters? Does she also concur that the Treasury might ask other government departments to justify their bids in terms of impact on well-being and that, as the noble Lord, Lord Layard, implied, spending plans for different government departments ought to include a much clearer national focus on well-being?
My noble friend the Minister will recall that the main strategy of the United Kingdom’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe a few years ago was to strengthen local democracy in Europe. At local level, that was to encourage valuable grass-roots protection against forms of extremism or imbalance if arising within the politics of different nation states. It was also to help safeguard the political rights and well-being of those within the regions and communities of the 47 states themselves.
The United Kingdom remains a much-respected member of the Council of Europe. Both here and within that institution abroad, it should now help to promote improved well-being standards, to the advantage of all.
We have made strides in understanding and responding to the well-being of adults. A national well-being measure is now collected and studied, and it informs policy-making. However, we do not collect an equivalent measure for children and young people. At present, their well-being is measured in an ad hoc manner, using unstandardised approaches, resulting in data that is of little use locally or nationally. That is despite our children bearing the brunt of increasing imbalances in society, of the ever-growing pressure of the obsession with school attainment results, and of rising mental ill-health and poverty.
The most powerful, compelling parts of the Children’s Society’s report are the voices of young people themselves; they are resourceful, resilient and reflective. They are often sanguine about the challenges they face. Such voices deserve to be heard and must be heard: more than heard, they must be front and centre of policy-making, locally and nationally. Introducing a national measurement of children’s well-being would mean policy informed by listening and responding to young people and showing that they and their voices really count. It could—it should—lead to action to arrest a deeply worrying trend. I therefore urge the Government to listen to such voices, introduce a measure of well-being and act accordingly.
I believe that well-being is very far away if you are in poverty. The first thing you need in order to build the basis of well-being is to be as far away from poverty as possible. If you go to India, you will find that many people have been lifted out of feral poverty: feral poverty is when you get up every day of the year and you do not know how you are going to feed your children. If you move into exploitative poverty, meaning that you get three or four dollars a day, it means that your children can go to school and that you have a regular life. Anybody looking at that kind of well-being—that sense of “my children have a future”—from the West, or a particular class aspect, would say, “That’s not well-being”, but it is. My father and mother lived practically the whole of the last stages of their lives in a glorious council flat, fully worked, fully fed; they had more well-being than virtually anyone else I know.
The human mind is like a monkey: it is restless, into everything, and it gets drawn in by every small distraction. From mindfulness we learn how to calm our monkey mind. We can watch thoughts from a distance and see them for what they are—just thoughts, which you can watch go by and decide not to engage with. Guess what happened. I found that being able to calm my mind and see things more objectively from a distance had an incredible, transformational effect on me. For the first time in years, I started to experience inexplicable moments of happiness. I became more open, aware and effective in my work life, my social life and my family life—in fact, practically perfect in every sense.
Your Lordships may be sitting there, thinking, “That’s a very nice story, but what does it have to do with well-being economics?” Its applications extend into many areas of social policy. Mindfulness works in the field of mental health without the need for drugs, and it has proved to be as effective for depression as current NHS first-line therapies. In clinical healthcare, there is also good evidence that mindfulness training improves well-being among those living with long-term health issues, particularly pain, multiple sclerosis, cancer and IBS. It also works in the workplace, particularly where individuals operate in stressful situations—and who does not from time to time? When online training was offered to police officers, they showed a marked improvement in their ability to do their jobs. Health service professionals have also benefited hugely. Just imagine what better decisions politicians would make if they had more insight and compassion for those whose lives they were making laws for.
Mindfulness works in schools, particularly helping children to improve their concentration, so it is particularly effective with children who suffer from ADHD and those perceived as disruptive. But imagine if we offered it to all children. What a generation of well-adjusted, compassionate and resilient individuals we would raise. Of course it also works in prisons. I have heard moving testimony on how mindfulness techniques help prisoners to calm themselves in stressful situations and avoid kicking off. It works for older people, who often suffer from isolation and depression, helping them to develop positive approaches to ageing well.
We had the Budget yesterday. As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said, with billions of pounds invested in physical infrastructure, if a fraction of that was devoted to developing our social infrastructure, through mindfulness and some of the other suggestions made by my noble friends and others made today, it would have a far-reaching effect on the well-being of our nation.
I am aware that GDP is not a very good measure, therefore we ought to try a better one. I was involved in something called the human development index. Basically, it adds up life expectancy, educational enrolment and income, which are weighted in a particular way. All those things are characteristics of aggregates. You can say that life expectancy can be measured for a whole population—it has to be. School enrolment is obviously a collective variable for a society, and income was basically calculated on a per capita basis. Therefore, one may be able to get a measure of a group of people without worrying about individual welfare. If I go from a country with a low life expectancy to one with a high life expectancy, my human development index does not go up; my life expectancy is mine, because it may be to do with my health. But you can say that, collectively, this society is better off than that society, because we are measuring collective variables, which do not conflict among individuals.
Any Government at any time can claim, “Of course we encourage well-being. We will give you a measure of well-being that will show that we encourage it.” Well-being is such a soft thing; get some clever people and you will be able to say every time, “That is our business. How could we not measure well-being? We have been doing that for ever and ever. Even austerity was good for people because we learned to live within our means and that is a good thing to do, because spendthriftness is a bad thing.”
One must be aware that things that are subject to manipulative measurement should not be used or urged on Governments as policy variables, because Governments are not to be trusted and they are not very competent.