Cost of Living: Public Well-being

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Primarolo (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Drake on initiating this very timely debate, given the challenges that our communities face. Many of the speeches today have been very detailed and, with great eloquence, have explained the cause at the heart of why so many people’s well-being is not what we would want it to be. That is down to the economic choices that this Government have made—the economic choices that they claimed they had to make, for which there was no alternative. Many of the contributions have detailed what the alternatives are, and they are still there for the Minister to take.

Understanding people’s experience is crucial for the credibility and accountability of public policy and, perhaps even more important for me, for the functioning of a democracy. When people believe that the Government do not know or care what their experience is, if people believe that their interests will never be represented, in my view their faith in the institutions of democracy is fundamentally undermined. This Government are playing fast and loose not only with the economy and our futures but with the very principles of democracy in our society. Why should you vote if it never makes a difference? Why should you vote or participate if no one cares about or values your experience and tries to ameliorate it? Why would you vote if you believed there was no justice in our society because the Government believe that if you give money to the people who have the most, somehow that will benefit all of us in the future?

The relentless rise in the cost of living has already taken a terrible toll on the well-being of many people in this country, particularly those on lower incomes. Measurements of well-being are about how well a person’s life is going, how they perceive themselves and how they experience their lives. What they are seeing is that the cost of living crisis, as it continues to deepen through 2023 and 2024, will fundamentally change their lives. How can it be right that a Government sacrifice their citizens’ well-being for an economic policy that does not even work, and change their minds about what it should be just about every day?

We live in a society where pensioners live in fear of not being able to pay their bills, and families are terrified that they are going to lose their homes. Across the country, millions of households are fretting about how they are going to pay for rising food and energy costs. First-time buyers cruelly had their opportunities to buy a house snatched away by the Government’s mini-Budget, after years when they had scrimped and saved for a home. People cannot afford to pay private rents because they are too high, and local authorities are unable to provide social housing for the many, which they desperately want to do. Child poverty is rising. Children are living in homes which cannot afford to be heated, without enough nutrition and food for their development. Children, who are the responsibility of all of us, are having their life chances snatched away from them before they have even had the opportunity to develop their potential.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, referred to the British Psychological Society’s survey about people’s attitudes to their well-being. I looked at the OECD figures, which make shocking reading. Shame on us that these figures show us below the average of OECD members. The share of the population at risk of depression—31%—is a very big number out of 68 million, and the share of the population at risk of anxiety is also 31%. The share of the population with very low life satisfaction is 9%. The figures show inequality between top earners and the bottom growing and growing. Inequalities between men and women in the UK, on every measurement, are below the OECD.

As the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, said, this is not difficult to put right. There are alternatives. What are the Government going to do to reverse the downward trend on well-being? What policies will they put in place to build financial resilience, including benefit up-rating and investment in our public services? What policies will the Government bring forward—assuming they are still in power next week—to restore the quality of life of households, reduce stress and reduce anxiety, give people confidence for tomorrow, next week and next year, and give them hope that actually their lives will get better? If the Minister cannot answer those questions and cannot lay that out to this House today, this Government do not deserve to be in power and a general election should be called.