Well-being

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield for enabling us to have this debate. Most people tend to think of well-being in terms of having a secure home, a rewarding job with some prospects, a good-quality education, access to a health service when needed, and enough money to enjoy life. They see those as being about their quality of life, and that quality of life suffers if they have poor housing, a low income or poor connectivity to get to, say, further education. As we have heard, the Government want to deliver people’s ambitions, but they prefer to assess their performance in terms of gross domestic product because growth drives tax income and the Government’s public spending. The consequence of this approach is a loss of environmental and social priorities as part of the measurement of success.

In a recent lecture at Northumbria University, Paul Polman, for 10 years the chief executive of Unilever and now the co-founder and chair of IMAGINE, a benefit corporation and foundation accelerating business leadership to achieve global goals, issued a welcome call to businesses to reinvent capitalism for the good of society generally. He showed that the companies demonstrating growth in most economic markets are those with clear social and environmental objectives. He has also shown that responsible business models can create more successful businesses and more successful places. Successful businesses, he has concluded, need more equal societies to be successful.

In my view, there is far too much short-term thinking in the private sector, which surely has a social responsibility to support places that are poorer and which feel left behind. I was pleased to be briefed earlier this week by Local Trust, which was founded by an endowment from the National Lottery Community Fund and which is the delivery agent for Big Local. It has as its key objective trusting local people in left-behind areas to decide what help they need the most. Research by Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion published in August last year by Local Trust under the title Left Behind? Understanding Communities on the Edge showed that areas that suffer multiple deprivation and have few places to meet, be they private, voluntary or public, which lack an engaged community and which have poor connectivity

“fare much worse than other deprived areas.”

This is important research because it recognises that deprived areas can be very different, with some suffering deep structural deprivation that is hard to reverse but which can be if local people lead the process. For me, this is an example of encouraging place-based well- being where local people are empowered to identify their own priorities, define their own solutions and help put them into practice. The solutions may be about places to meet or perhaps the provision of transport to improve connectivity. Often, these are places which have not been able to access lottery or statutory funding.

In recent weeks, we have learned from the Marmot review that health inequalities have widened over the past decade, with a slowdown in life expectancy. We have learned that south-east England has had half the gain in new jobs over the past 10 years, while we have learned from an OECD report that Britain has the widest regional inequality of any advanced nation. We have learned from the Office for National Statistics that the median income for the poorest 20% of people fell by 4.3% per year over the two years to March 2019. Moreover, we have learned from the UK2070 Commission of the coming opportunity to retrain the 4 million workers in the Midlands and the north currently in carbon-intensive jobs into work in new green industries.

The delivery of well-being for all needs clear leadership from the Government and adopting a strategy that addresses the inequalities between places. It needs all Whitehall departments to adopt well-being standards in their planning and establishing agreed reporting mechanisms. As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said earlier, pursuing well-being should be the main objective of any Government: it is in their interests to adopt it.