Lord Layard: My Lords, we all know the problem facing our country: as a nation, we have become poorer. Our import prices have risen more than our export prices and, on that account, we are 5% poorer than we were a year or so ago. That is a lot of money—over £100 billion a year—and it is something we cannot escape. This is the issue that the Chancellor is facing: who should bear the cost of the loss...
Lord Layard: My Lords, Amendment 101B, in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, and the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, is a fundamental amendment to remedy the shocking imbalance between the provision of mental and physical healthcare. As was said in the debate last week, people with mental disorders who receive treatment are a minority—35% of children and 40% of adults—while for people...
Lord Layard: I want to make just three points. The main argument that we have heard against the Bill is the fear that relatives will exert undue pressure. For many years, I was persuaded by that argument. However, we now have evidence on these matters. We should look at the evidence, not just the fear. The evidence that we have comes from the places that have done this, including Oregon and Australia, and...
Lord Layard: I support Amendment 50, which could transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of our young people. Given the time, I shall make just four points. The problem is much bigger than most people, maybe myself included, have realised. In 2019-20, the proportion of all 18 year-olds who were in no form of education or work-based training was 30%. That 30% of the 50% not going to university are...
Lord Layard: My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 76. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, has argued so powerfully, we are, as a nation, very good at producing graduates and pretty bad at producing skills for the other 50%. I start with a quite extraordinary statistic: if you ask what proportion of all the 18 year-olds in our country are not in any form of education or work-based learning, the...
Lord Layard: My Lords, we should really welcome this Bill, because, as we know, our country does a pretty good job with its graduates but a much less good job with the other 50%. If we are looking for reasons for the difference in the treatment of these two, we should look immediately at the different ways in which they are funded. If you are going down the academic—the route to university—the funding...
Lord Layard: My Lords, the huge danger that we face is mass long-term unemployment. Once that takes root, it is extremely difficult to reduce it. It kills the human spirit but also of course costs the Exchequer a lot of money. However, there is a well-tested way to prevent it, which is an active labour market policy. Instead of paying people money for doing nothing, we pay employers to employ them to do...
Lord Layard: My Lords, I really welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness on securing it. As she said, this is a timely moment to consider the fundamental question of what the objective of government is, because that should be reflected in the spending review. In my view, the well-being of the people is the only really sensible objective. As Thomas Jefferson said: “The care of human life...
Lord Layard: My Lords, if we look abroad, especially to Japan and China, it is clearly not as inevitable as the Government assume that this disease will become widely spread through the population. Extraordinarily, in Hubei province, the epicentre of the disease, the proportion of the population who caught it was 0.1%. So how can we be hearing our experts talking about up to 80% of our population being...
Lord Layard: My Lords, the first question one should ask about any Queen’s Speech is: what is the overall objective of government policy? Is it the nation’s wealth? Is it the well-being of the citizens? What is it? To have coherent government, you must have an overall objective against which to measure policy. More and more people worldwide are demanding that the objective should be human...
Lord Layard: My Lords, I welcome this debate because we are talking about the future of at least half of all our young people. For those who do not go to university, apprenticeship has always been the main route to a skill. It has also been the biggest source of social mobility in our country, but unfortunately in the 1970s and 1980s both our main political parties switched their focus to full-time...
Lord Layard: My Lords, many years ago I worked on the Robbins report, and I believe that the Augar review could well turn out to be at least as important. Robbins unleashed the expansion of HE and I hope that the Augar report will unleash the expansion of FE. That is what I want to talk about. The question is how to unleash such an expansion. I will focus my remarks on levels 2 and 3, which is where we...
Lord Layard: My Lords, I welcome this debate about what is a central issue of our time. It is an ethical issue because the starting point of ethics is that every human being matters equally. This means that future generations are of equal importance to our own. However, they are not in a position to speak for themselves, so we have to act for them and invest in their future as if it were our own. In that...
Lord Layard: My Lords, in her excellent speech my noble friend Lady Royall described the dismal state of access to treatment for young people with mental health problems—a point repeated by almost every speaker. The question is how to deal with it. I think that the way forward is quite clear, because the situation for children now is almost exactly the same as it was for adults in 2008. However, since...
Lord Layard: My Lords, I thank our great leader for the way in which he led us to produce what is, I think, a landmark report. For me, its most landmark feature concerns non-graduate vocational education, so I want to talk about our three main proposals in that area. As we all know, Britain is good at higher education and bad at non-graduate vocational education, and this has big economic effects. Our...
Lord Layard: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the committee and, like many earlier speakers, think that something more radical is needed on funding. The fundamental problem with the present system is the complete disconnect between the Government’s funding decisions and, on the other hand, what the public want and are willing to pay for. For example, in a recent MORI poll, people were asked to pick out...
Lord Layard: My Lords, like other members of the committee, I add my thanks to the noble Lord in front of me for the excellent way in which he has led our committee over the years. I thank him very much. I will speak about only one recommendation in our report: the last recommendation, about research and development, which I think is one of the most important. It is important for one very simple reason:...
Lord Layard: My Lords, as a member of the committee, I too thank our great leader, sitting in front of me. As has been said, the starting point for our inquiry was a very remarkable estimate that is widely accepted—that, simply to stop real house prices and rents from rising further, we need not 200,000 homes a year but 300,000, just to stop things getting worse. However, surely we want things to get...
Lord Layard: I am grateful for that. I am a bit more hopeful about dealing with climate change by electrifying the economy with clean electricity rather than by failing to give people homes. I think that we can make progress without expecting people to go into ever more expensive properties. I was very encouraged by what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said about the green belt. It is true that attitudes...
Lord Layard: My Lords, the Government are great believers in the principle of “nudge” and have greatly expanded the nudge unit. The fundamental principle of nudge is that, by quite small differences in institutional arrangements, you can produce big differences in outcomes. One principle of nudge is to give people an opportunity to protect themselves against their worse natures. That is exactly what...
