Baroness Wheatcroft
Main Page: Baroness Wheatcroft (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Wheatcroft (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on securing this debate. It is an important subject and we have heard so many interesting speeches already.
Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who was responsible for designing the modern GDP, said:
“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”.
That has to be right. Last year, New Zealand acknowledged this with a ground-breaking well-being budget. Everything that was spent had to be measured by one of five criteria, all of which would add up to a healthier, happier country. New Zealand’s Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, said:
“For me, wellbeing means people living lives of purpose, balance and meaning to them, and having the capabilities to do so.”
The definition of a life of “purpose, balance and meaning” is inevitably somewhat subjective, but the noble Lord, Lord Layard, with all his expertise in this area, made clear the types of metrics which could be brought into play to start broadening our measurements beyond GDP. According to the London School of Economics, the noble Lord, Lord Layard, is an expert on happiness—an admirable accolade for anyone to have, and too rare.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, mentioned, last August the Children’s Society found that childhood happiness in the UK was at its lowest level in a decade. On a scale of one to 10, the 10 to 15 year-olds who were asked rated their happiness at an average of 7.89 and almost 5% reported scores of below 5. We may still have one of the largest economies in the world, but if around 219,000 children are unhappy, our economy is failing.
We have to ask whether we have got our priorities right. Clinging to GDP as the major key to national budgeting and policy-making is clearly not delivering. Now is an opportune time for a rethink since, after all, the Office for Budget Responsibility is now forecasting that Brexit alone will cost the country a 5.2% loss of GDP over 15 years. If GDP is all-important, our country is going to be in a sorry state, so it would be wise for the Government to broaden their way of measuring their success.
Growth is not necessarily good. We have seen what the unfettered pursuit of growth delivers: drastic climate change, huge discrepancies between the people at the top of business and the rest, and too many people now who are the working poor. Our policy-making needs to focus more broadly. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, referred to Bhutan, which is famous for measuring gross national happiness. While the aim may be worthy, I am afraid that it has not proved an unmitigated success. Some 200,000 people in Bhutan are surviving on less than $1.25 a day—they are probably not too happy. A rise in violent crime there is not destined to bolster the gross national happiness index either.
Nevertheless, government should be interested in fostering the public’s well-being. We know what makes people flourish. The welfare state was intended to provide people with the confidence that if things went wrong for them, they would not be allowed to fall below a certain standard of living. Universal credit may be a good idea in principle, but there is far too much evidence that it is causing misery in this country.
What produces a sense of well-being? Clearly, mindfulness can do that, and we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, what a difference mindfulness has made to her life. Exercise, too, is not just a benefit physically but mentally; equally, access to the arts and cultural activities is truly life-enhancing. Lord Lloyd-Webber has pioneered a fantastic scheme for handing out musical instruments to children in troubled schools. The instruments are theirs to keep, and they are having a dramatic effect on the way those children behave. Instead of joining gangs, they join orchestras and have a totally different attitude to life. In Manchester, an enlightened approach to health has led to doctors prescribing museum visits and drawing lessons instead of pills. It works and it is cost-effective. One surgery there is trying a new scheme: sending people home with a pot plant. They find that having something to care for and nurture is a real tonic for those suffering from depression.
Perhaps the clue lies there: the greatest threat to our well-being is loneliness. A study by the Co-op and the Red Cross has found that more than 9 million people in the UK often or always feel lonely. Age UK has found that half a million older people go for at least five or six days a week without seeing or speaking to anyone at all. That is a terrible condemnation of our society. Investing in the rebuilding of our social infrastructure should be a priority for this Government and every successive one.