Southern Cross have been following the wrong star

 By squareintheteeth

‘Yes, but what difference would using well-being measures in policy-making actually make?’. I was asked this question last week by a senior civil servant whose job description includes a focus on well-being. In fact it’s the key question to which those of us advocating for a new way of conceiving and measuring success need to be able to provide a convincing answer.

Here’s one quick example of the difference I think it would make.  This morning we heard the deeply distressing news of the precarious financial situation of Southern Cross. It’s a company which, in the effort to apply the private sector mantra of growing its business, has landed itself in unsustainable debt  and is unable to pay its rent bills. Which might just be another sorry tale of over-reaching corporate greed, except that Southern Cross is  a provider of care home services to 31,000 elderly people. Its current financial troubles risk a severe, and potentially dangerous in some cases, disruption to their lives.

For me this illustrates a simple point. Allowing private companies provide vital services to vulnerable people in our society is based on the assumption that the profit motive will be strong enough to ensure that they provide those services to a high standard. But here’s an example where it seems to have done exactly the opposite. If organisations had a duty to provide the highest well-being to their clients rather than the highest return to their shareholders, it seems very likely that the situation Southern Cross is currently in simply would not have happened. If only it had focusing on doing everything in its power to promote the well-being of its residents, rather than to grow its bottom line.