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‘What would you prefer, Lord Layard?’, asked the young woman, ‘tea or coffee?’. I hesitated, not knowing what to reply, not because I didn’t know, but because I wasn’t Lord Layard. ‘Tea would be lovely’, I said. In 2007, we were invited to the Cabinet Office to discuss our proposal for a national psychotherapy service to treat depression, along with some mandarins from the Treasury. Just as we were shown into a spacious waiting room ahead of our meeting, Lord Layard rushed off to the toilets to change his shoes. ‘Don’t worry Jeremy’, he’d said, in his trainers on the steps outside in Whitehall, ‘I’ve got some proper shoes. I’ll put them on once we’re inside’. So when the secretary popped out to ask what we preferred, there was only me there. Briefly, I was Professor Lord Richard Layard.
The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Programme, otherwise known as IAPT, whose business case at £300 million was about to be agreed, was Richard’s brainchild. It was Richard who persuaded successive governments to invest £1.3 billion in IAPT services during a decade of deepening austerity. By that time, of course, I was no longer Lord Layard.
Fifty years earlier, it was a different case of mistaken identity. Dick Rowe was the man who turned down the Beatles. Remember, Gerhart Piers? Probably not. He was the man who turned down A. T. Beck, the inventor of CBT. In 2021, Tim Beck will be 100. He has lived to see his scientific research enable CBT to overtake anti-depressants as the first choice of treatment for depression (NICE, 2009). Beck was a pioneer in evidence-based therapy (Beck, 1967). His inventory for measuring depression (Beck et al., 1961), and treatment manual for cognitive therapy (Beck et al., 1979), are used now worldwide (Rosner, 2018). Less well known is that he started out as a psychoanalyst. Beck began his groundbreaking research to defend our discipline against criticisms that it was ‘not scientific’ (Rosner, 2014).
But when he applied to join the America