Lord O'Donnell (CB)

My Lords, I will speak on behalf of Amendment 472, which is in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, who has spoken very well, and the noble Lords, Lord Layard and Lord Moynihan. This is a modest proposal, but it is probably the most important one. I have sat through all the hours of this debate and I would say to all noble Lords who have spoken that, if this does not go through, they will not succeed. The reason I say that is that I have not spent over two decades in the Treasury without knowing that you need evidence: you need to prove what works. Your Lordships have talked various things. The noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, mentioned various interventions and wanting to know whether the costs and benefits were worthwhile; that is absolutely right. She mentioned NICE. The key thing about NICE is that it works out whether a given medicine is worthwhile by doing a cost-benefit analysis based on QALYs—quality adjusted life years. We now have more sophisticated measures known as WELLBYs—well-being years. To understand whether a thing makes sense, we need to do the assessment and for that we need data. Your Lordships have all made suggestions: we want more physical exercise; we want less bullying; and we want to think about what things in SEND work. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, we need some common definitions. We need a common definition of well-being that we can use; the department can give us that. Then we can work on the basis of exactly how important and how effective all these things are. If we think about how this debate started, we all talked about our favourite brand of school: free schools, academies, you name it. How do we assess which one is better? Well, either implicitly or, in some cases, very explicitly, it was a matter of exam results or Ofsted rankings. Nobody talked about these schools’ impact on well-being, for the very good reason that we do not know. We do not have data. The only data we have is the world’s most embarrassing data of all, which nobody has mentioned yet: the PISA data. The PISA data shows us that, out of all of Europe, our young people have the lowest well-being. Of the 38 countries in the OECD, where do we come? In 37th place. My favourite football team, Manchester United, is not even that bad in the league.