Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA (born 15 March 1934) is a British labour economist, co-director of the Community Wellbeing programme at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report.

His work on mental health, including publishing The Depression Report in 2006, led to the establishment of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme in England.

It assigns an important role to how unemployed people are treated, and provides the intellectual basis for the welfare-to-work policies introduced in many countries, including Britain, Germany and Denmark.

In the 1980s he was Chairman of the European Commission’s Macroeconomic Policy Group and in the 1990s the Hartz reforms in Germany were influenced by his work.

He supported the idea of welfare-to-work, where social welfare payments are structured in a way that encourages (or forces) recipients back into the job market.

As well as academic positions, Layard worked as an advisor for numerous organisations, including government institutions in the United Kingdom and Russia.

The Centre has become one of Europe's leading research institutes Layard became active in the study of what has since come to be known as happiness economics.

And since the 1970s he has urged fellow economists to return to the idea that public policy should maximise a social welfare function depending on the distribution of happiness.

In 1980 he wrote (according to Richard Easterlin) "the first paper to focus specifically on the policy implications of empirical research on happiness".

This co-authored work was published in 2014 and more fully in a book called The Origins of Happiness: The science of wellbeing over the life course (2018).

In a series of co-authored articles he showed how psychological therapy affected employment and thus paid for itself in savings on welfare benefits and lost taxes.

His central aim has always been to develop wellbeing science to the point where it can provide key evidence for the selection of all policy priorities.

This aims to persuade policy-makers that wellbeing is a feasible goal for them, and also to develop the cadre of trained analysts to help them target it.

Layard’s current research is focused on showing how this approach can illuminate public priorities through worked examples of benefit/cost ratios across the whole field of policy.

In 2010 he persuaded the British Prime Minister David Cameron  that wellbeing would be a major government objective, and be regularly measured in the national statistics.

Since then the World Happiness Report has provided a stream of evidence for policy-makers on the ways in which they can improve the wellbeing of their people.

One, called Action for Happiness (founded in 2012), is a popular movement for personal change to produce a happier world.