The time is now for well-being policy

Above: Jo Swinson MP, Charles Seaford and Martin Seligman at the Well-being APPG.

As I sat listening to Professor Martin Seligman, the founding father of the Positive Psychology movement, talk about ‘well-being and public policy’ at our All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics meeting last week, I was struck by how now is maybe one of those rare times that politics and science are aligned in their visions for the future of society. This makes it absolutely essential that we step up political pressure on the government to make sure well-being continues to become a serious feature of improvements in policy-making across both central and local government.

The event was the most popular APPG meeting we’ve held to date, reflecting not only the reputation of Martin Seligman but also the prominence of well-being in the academic and policy worlds right now. And Professor Seligman himself seemed excited to be there – he revealed that he’d immediately changed plans for his family holiday when he heard he had the chance to talk at parliament because the UK was the ‘centre court for the world right now’ in this area. Charles Seaford of nef, who also spoke at the meeting, commented on this feeling of ‘now’s the time’.

So why is now the time? Maybe it’s because there has been an expansion of evidence over the last few years showing that individuals’ well-being – how well they are able to function in life and feel happy – is affected by things like their employment status, their working hours, the presence of green spaces around them – all things that public policy can influence. And now there is a good amount of evidence that targeted interventions can successfully improve levels of well-being in groups of people. In fact, one $140 million intervention that Seligman has designed currently seems to be raising levels of ‘emotional and social fitness’ in the US Army, which with 1.1 million employees is the second largest US employer.

But this is not enough. Professor Seligman recounted a conversation he’d had with another big advocate of using well-being to guide policy, Professor Lord Richard Layard.  Layard said:

“You just don’t get it, do you Marty...you probably think that in parliament, in public policy, that the relationship between science and politics is that the evidence accumulates and accumulates to a point that is irresistible to people in politics” he said. “I’ve never seen such instants in my public life. What happens,” Richard said, “is that sufficient evidence is present and the political will is present. And when those two things together happen, you get public policy.” ’

So is there a real political will to change the way things are done in policy-making? Well, in David Cameron’s speech last November, he said:

“If your goal in politics is to help make a better life for people – which mine is…then you have got to take practical steps to make sure government is properly focused on our quality of life as well as economic growth...”

This is something that the Centre for Well-being at nef has been calling for since it published its well-being manifesto back in 2004. And we now have the means to hold Mr Cameron to account – we are the first country to have started using subjective measures of well-being on a national-level. This means we will have evidence about how well-being is distributed in the UK and the individual objective circumstances it is associated with that can be influenced by national and local policy. We then need to make sure that Mr Cameron’s ‘practical steps’ use this evidence to guide the way that policies are designed, prioritised and evaluated.

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This article was edited 18 July 2011. It had incorrectly said that the US Army was spending $140 billion on its resilience programme. This has now been amended to $140 million.