Putting well-being at the heart of local places

Last year, as part of a project for a London-based charity, a colleague and I spoke to a number of people working in local government. We asked them how their day-to-day work related to well-being. Often, they were perplexed by the question. Their whole working lives had been spent trying to do things like improving the provision of services to vulnerable adults, or to create healthier local populations. Surely, they said, everything they did was about well-being.

We didn’t disagree. But we did feel that despite their best efforts, often something was missing. ‘Well-being’ was too often seen as the remit of people working in specific departments – in social care, public health-related roles, or of health professionals themselves – rather than something to which all parts of local government can contribute. There was not always a consistent understanding that well-being must be about how people experience their own lives as well as what they have, that it requires a shift in focus from what can go wrong in people’s lives to what makes them well, and that it’s about social connections as well as personal actions. Local government employees didn’t always have the backing from the top of their organisations to say ‘We know we can’t make people happy, but we can create the conditions that enable people and communities to flourish’.

So we were really pleased when, a month or so later, the opportunity arose to work with LGID and the National Mental Health Development Unit to examine the role of local government in promoting well-being. The resulting report reflects the best of local government action on well-being to date, and sets out how it can become much more embedded into the everyday functions of local government.

The report argues that action is needed across a range of areas: to set out an overarching vision for well-being locally, to design in well-being evidence across the range of services specifications and commissioning processes, to use community empowerment to promote  well-being, and to focus on the well-being of local government staff as a key route to improving it more generally. And crucially, local authorities need to measure well-being outcomes so that they can track their progress. These are not pie-in-the-sky notions. We found a number of examples of councils doing each of these things. My favourite part of the project – and one which has attracted lots of interest so far - was constructing a table of examples which show how local authority activity is enabling each of the Five Ways to Well-being across six main service areas.

Originally planned for earlier in the year, the publication of the report last Friday seems to me to have happened at just the right time. It came just after news that central government is to start measuring well-being at a national level, a move which stands to place well-being outcomes at the heart of policy-making. It also comes at a time when councils are facing massive reductions in their incomes. This makes a focus on well-being all the more crucial – to protect the welfare of the most vulnerable and to ensure that the renewed focus on efficiency means that every pound of public money spent results in biggest possible increase in people’s well-being.