Climate Goals: Wellbeing Economy

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. It is also a great pleasure to support the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). We were great colleagues in the European Parliament and, dare I say, the precursors to the co-operation that we are seeing in Scotland, where Green leadership is taking us to new vistas of co-operation.

The wellbeing economy is an idea whose time has come. We are measuring the wrong stuff. So much of what we see within the public debate about public services and public investment posits economic growth versus wellbeing or versus environmental standards or other measures of public good. It should not be either/or; we need to consider both. We are measuring the wrong stuff. That means that the criteria against which we measure outputs is leading us to perverse incentives.

The pandemic we are all, sadly, very much still living through—we cannot relax yet—is a disruptive event for a lot of people: not just everyone in this room, but all our constituents as well. People are considering how they live their lives, where they get their food, how they travel to work, where they work, what they do and how they spend their time. Questions of work and productivity are being examined in households up and down the length of these islands in ways they never have been before. GDP is a rubbish measure of any human happiness.

If we want to increase GDP, I will give two examples. A car crash is a fantastic way to increase GDP, because it involves garages, lawyers, insurance companies. It involves all sorts of things that are not economically productive, but do count from an GDP perspective as positive to the balance sheet. Divorce is also great for GDP: one house becomes two; lawyers make lots of money; and assets are split up. There are various economic things that count in the GDP ledger, but are surely not positive for us as a society.

It strikes me as self-evident that adding a wider set of criteria to the public sector consideration of expenditure can lead only to better outcomes. Likewise, I am very drawn to the Carnegie UK Trust’s idea of a gross domestic wellbeing index as a way to benchmark actual progress. About 300 years ago I proposed to the SNP conference that Scotland should adopt a Nordic-style wellbeing index to benchmark the progress of society against other comparable countries—and here we are 15 or so years later.

I close with one very concrete example, which shows that this is not an esoteric, niche subject but aimed at bringing about real change in the real world. Bus services in Stirling and the Forth valley are not fit for purpose. They are not up to scratch. They are not as reliable as they need to be. Bus services are not in my remit, as a Member of this Westminster Parliament, but I see that systemic change is necessary, because we are looking at the wrong outputs and outcomes. There is too little public funding available to support the bus network that we need. However, how many people have to have a car but would not have one if they could rely on buses? How much unproductive capital is tied up in those vehicles? Think about how many carbon emissions we could get rid of if the bus services were reliable. Think about the lost economic productivity of the people who cannot afford cars but cannot get to work either. If we change the metrics, we change the outcome.

As we have heard, the Scottish Government have started that work. The Scottish national performance framework brings in a wider set of criteria. There is the Wellbeing Economy Alliance with Iceland and other small countries. We are already doing this work, and we can do much more. That is not to say that the UK cannot do more too. I look forward to hearing from the Minister; she could have positive engagement and support if she actually took serious steps in this direction. Fair work must also be properly considered in this equation, and we must ensure that the new jobs are good jobs, fair jobs and well-paid jobs. If we grab this at the flow, there is a big prize that we can all share.