Richard Layard

Professor Lord Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he was until 2003 the founder-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance. He now heads the Centre’s Programme on Well-Being. Since 2000 he has been a member of the House of Lords and is a keen advocate of making subjective well-being of the people the central objective of governments. A labour economist by specialisation, he made major contributions on unemployment, inflation, inequality and post-Communist reform. He was an early advocate of the welfare-to-work approach to European unemployment. His influential book Happiness – Lessons from a New Science was published in 2005 and has sold 150,000 copies in 20 languages. A second edition was published in 2011. He also advises the British Government on mental health policy and is an architect of the new revolutionary policy of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). His latest book, co-authored with David Clark, Thrive: The power of evidence-based psychological therapies, was published in 2014.