Well-being

Lord Tugendhat Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

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.

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.