Sir Gus and the well-being revolution

Yesterday was a pretty big day in the UK’s journey towards more well-being oriented policy. It saw the publication of the findings of the Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s National Debate on Measuring National Well-being, and of a Treasury paper which finds that policy valuation techniques using subjective well-being data ‘may soon provide a reliable and accepted complement to the more traditional economic approaches’. At the same time, the government’s policy evaluation bible, the Green Book, has been updated to recognise these new techniques. It seems the plates really are shifting – the government is taking seriously the idea that information about how people’s lives are going can improve the process of policy making.

The headline findings from the National Debate – which, as National Statistician Jil Matheson pointed out at the launch event, was more open than a typical government consultation based on a set of on pre-defined proposals – suggest that people’s views are pretty well in tune with the substantial findings in the well-being literature. The responses of around 34,000 individuals and organisations were gathered from sources including formal submissions, discussion by participants in 175 events held around the country, answers to a consultation questionnaire and on-line comments in response to media articles. They suggest that the areas of life which people think matter most are: health, relationships, work and the environment (both local environment now and future condition of the environment). These are all things which research has shown are important factors in driving the ultimate human outcome: people’s sense of whether their lives are going well – their subjective well-being. These areas will influence the design of the eventual measures of ‘national well-being’ which ONS will produce, but importantly Jil Matheson confirmed that the measures will preserve the important distinction between the drivers of subjective well-being and subjective well-being itself.

The consultation also revealed that, running through the answers which mentioned specific drivers of well-being, there was a ‘commonly held view that there should be a greater sense of fairness and equality, for the sake of our national well-being’. While respondents were not a representative sample of the UK population, this suggests (again in line with the evidence, yet contrary to much political rhetoric) that people believe equality is good for everyone in society.

For me, perhaps the most interesting part of the launch event was hearing the head of the civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, reflect a sense of urgency about getting well-being measures used in policy-making, so that they start making a real difference to people’s lives. As he said, there is no point having beautifully written Green Book guidance if nobody actually uses it. He was determined to avoid ‘a lag’ between starting the measurement and getting policies directed towards subjective well-being, and outlined a number of policy areas where he thought we could start to see changes: in encouraging altruism and volunteering, devolving spending decisions to communities, helping with the massive carbon reductions that we need to achieve and helping people make better decisions about  how they spend their money so that they achieve a better balance between work and other parts of life. All are policy directions which nef has strongly advocated across a number of our research areas.

I left the event with a satisfying thought: what better indication that well-being measurement has strength as a policy tool than when it gets the top civil servant in the country to sound like a new economics textbook?