9 September 2008

Rt Hon James Purnell MP

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

Well-being- improving the way we work

Young Foundation Conference - QEII Centre

Tuesday, 9 September 2008

[Check against delivery]

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. Two years ago, I was part of a seminar on well-being with Richard Layard and Oliver James in the House of Commons. After half an hour, we had to move rooms because so many people were trying to squeeze in to listen.

So, I'm glad to see you've booked a conference centre for today's event. Not because I'm anticipating a rush of people to hear me. But because it shows that the issue of well-being has come of age. Two years ago, Richard had just published his seminal book, and the issue of well-being was taking off. Today, it is at the happy stage of risking becoming a cliché, with politicians of all stripes talking about the goal of well-being.

But it's when a concept becomes a cliché that the backlash can start. Early adopters move on to the next summer's intellectual fad. More importantly, good counter-arguments are developed. If we ignore them, we keep our conversation comfortable but closed.

So, today, I want to talk about the main counter-argument, and suggest how we should respond.

First, let me say that the work on well-being provides insights which should shape policies across government. The facts call for action.

• six million people suffer from depression or anxiety.
• two-thirds of adults say that work interferes with their family lives.
• British teenagers trust each other less than those in almost any other country.

In simple terms, Britain could be happier.

But the counter-argument needs to be addressed. It goes like this.

The terms of the debate on well-being are unclear: they slide from a very general definition of happiness on the one hand to a specific concern about depression on the other.

This confusion allows different arguments to cluster under the banner of well-being – from those focused specifically on how to treat depression to those who think that capitalism causes unhappiness.

And they say the well-being agenda is based on a mistake – the Easterlin paradox, which suggested that countries got no happier as they got richer. Easterlin’s research is indeed threaded through most of the literature on well-being.

Yet, as Danny Finkelstein recently reported, the research may well be wrong. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, from Wharton, have argued that there is “a clear and positive link between average levels of subjective wellbeing across countries with no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective wellbeing”.

So, we do get happier as we get richer. And there doesn’t appear to be declining happiness returns to wealth.

Danny concludes his blog by asking many of the people in this room, including me, a question:

“So what will happen now with these critics? Will they ignore the data? Will they walk away from the happiness idea and forget they ever mentioned it? Or will they turn their work on its head and use the new evidence to start arguing that capitalism might be the route to happiness after all?”

Good questions. I’m sure some will want to examine the new data, and see whether it stacks up.

But I think that’s besides the main point. The main point is that Stevenson-Wolfers’ work should remind us of an important political truth: data doesn’t trump individual choice.

Part of the reason some people are attracted to the well-being agenda is that it seems to be a way of justifying their existing convictions: people would be happier if there were less wealth inequality, so let’s have more redistribution. Children are happier if their parents are at home in the first three years, so mothers should stay at home. Capitalism makes people unhappy, so we should get rid of capitalism.

You don’t make policies by calculating what makes people happy but by presenting them with choices at the ballot box. Data informs what those policies should be – but only voters can choose.

Governments cannot impose their utopia on people, however good their data. The 20th century and Isaiah Berlin taught us that lesson.

So, we should not try.

But we should not lose sight of the simple truth: that there is more to life than money. Or, more precisely, more to politics than growth. It’s not a new idea. For example, in 1967, Robert Kennedy said:

“We cannot measure . . . national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes ... it does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education or the joy of their play ... neither for the justice in our courts, nor for the justice of our dealings with each other ... It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

There should be no need to reiterate this point.

But how is government to bring about good growth, if it can’t choose utopias for its citizens? I think the answer is also simple: by giving them the power to choose their own utopia.

If this is right, then the central role of government becomes to give people power. Because only they can decide what is right for them and their family. That means removing restrictions on people’s freedom: people should be genuinely free to choose the lifestyle they want, provided it doesn’t harm others. That’s why it was so important to legislate to allow gay couples to marry. Or why having a uniform 11 o’clock closing time for pubs across the country was wrong. Those are not decisions for government but for individuals.

But it also means giving people power to pursue those goals. It’s not enough to be free to choose where you want to go. You need to be able to get there.

Lack of power is a fundamental cause of unhappiness. If people don’t have power, and are trapped in a miserable situation, they can’t escape. A concern for well-being requires a commitment to empowerment.

Welfare reform and well-being
And it’s why I want to reform the welfare state so that it requires people to work and exercise their personal responsibility.

Our recent welfare reform Green Paper was based on a simple idea. More support in return for higher expectations. This means that individuals are expected to work where that’s possible and that Government will do all it can to help people realise this goal.

I believe the measures we put forward to support and encourage people into work are right not just because we all have a responsibility to work. They are also right because being out of work makes people miserable.

Worklessness contributes not only to poverty of income, but also to poverty of well-being. There is increasingly robust evidence that being out of work exacerbates mental illness – and that having a job is good for your health. In fact Richard Layard has argued powerfully that when someone becomes unemployed the damage to their self-esteem is as significant as the impact on their finances, calling the loss of a job “a double whammy – the loss of the income hurts, but so does the loss of self-respect”

One area where this need is particularly stark is the rise in the proportion of people who are claiming because of mental health problems. And this is a pressing issue for government – as serious as obesity or the challenge of an ageing society.

We need to remove the stigma around mental health. We need to transform the support we offer for depression. And we need to understand much better how to help people with mental health issues back in to work.

This has started already. We have a better test for whether someone faces barriers to work because of mental health. We are doubling the amount we spend on helping people with disabilities stay in work.

But we need to transform our services so that they do two things much better: better treatment and better back to work support.

This is a complicated, overlapping area of policy. But the path has already been cleared by Dame Carol Black’s report on work and well-being and Richard Layard’s work on improving access to talking therapies. Over the next few months, we have important work to do in making sure that these two tracks of policy are heading in complementary directions.

We’ve already started – we have placed employment advisers in GP’s surgeries, so that doctors can prescribe work as well as medicine. And we are ensuring that the Primary Care Trusts who are piloting how to improve access to psychological therapy can refer people to support to get back to work.

We are also setting out a National Strategy for Mental Health and Employment to co-ordinate across Government a response to the challenges faced by those with mental health conditions.

But Whitehall finds it very hard to join policies like this up, and it will be just as important for local communities to work out how to improve the way we support people with mental health problems get better and get back to work. So, we’re prepared to devolve power to areas that want to innovate.

Good Work
But there are, of course, two sides to this coin. Welfare and work. So, just as we care about getting people back to work, so we also care about the nature of the work that they do.

We want people to have sustainable jobs – not get stuck on a merry-go-round between benefits and insecure work. We want them to progress in their careers – not get trapped in low paid, poor quality work. We want work itself to be rewarding and productive.

This means matching a transformation in welfare with a transformation of work.

This agenda starts from a simple human reality. Work is one of the most significant parts of our lives – our time, our identity, our goals and our relationships. Many of us are lucky enough to find meaning, satisfaction and reward in our work. But as the recent TUC Commission on Vulnerable Employment pointed out, there are still too many people whose experience is of being exploited, badly paid, degraded or simply bored.

So work matters. And through the efforts of organisations such as the Work Foundation, the Health and Safety Executive and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, we are developing a good understanding or what some have called ‘good work’. Key elements include:

• Work that is interesting and where people have a degree of autonomy and control over the tasks being done
• A fair balance between effort and reward – not just in terms of pay but in the quality of management and opportunities for development
• Strong, trusting and respectful relationships within the workplace – including opportunities for employee ‘voice’ within organisations
• A reasonable degree of security and fair treatment – for instance in relation to pay and basic employment rights

In Britain we already have some of the best employers in the world, whose organisations embody these principles. Indeed, in a world where the quality of people is increasingly the key to success, these core characteristics are often central to their effectiveness.

As the structure of the labour market and the organisation of work continue to shift, the agenda around ‘good work’ only becomes more significant. And while in the past industrial relations were often characterised by confrontation, employers and employees now agree that it’s important.

The state doesn’t – and absolutely shouldn’t – be in the business of running businesses – nor trying to legislate good jobs into existence. So what role can government play in encouraging ‘good work’ and improving well-being within the workplace? I want to finish by briefly highlighting some potential areas.

First, sensible, proportionate regulation ensures basic minimum standards within the workplace. These rights are especially important for those in vulnerable employment and with little power or voice in the workplace – and we must make sure they are fully enforced across the labour market.

Second, we can make sure that the goal of my Department, and the welfare reform agenda as a whole, is helping people not just to get into but to get on at work. So, we will make sure people can access training to improve their pay and prospects. And we will give advice to people after they get in to work, not just before.

Third, there is also a role for wider, non-statutory, steps – advice, guidance, sharing best practice - to shape a culture which encourages healthier, more productive work.

One role Government can play is to develop more robust evidence. To this end, I recognise the need to improve the quality of research into well-being, as well as into the working age population more generally. I have asked my Department to explore the potential for a major long term research project on well-being and work, and to undertake such a project as soon as is possible to add to the information at our disposal. And I’m interested in how we can work with other departments and research institutions to see if we can develop a network of research into the different aspects of well-being.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the well-being literature doesn’t have all the answers. But it does have important insights. It reminds us that there is more to life than money. It focuses us on reducing avoidable miseries- notably the often wretched misery of mental illness. It calls on us to increase the power people have to seek the life and the happiness they want.

And that is in many ways the crucial point. The life people want to lead. The happiness they define.

And that is the crucial role for Government – to give people power, so that they can be happy.

Thank you.