Last month, the debate around measuring well-being took a significant step change when David Cameron officially asked the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) to begin collecting data on well-being. The survey that the ONS will be using is the Integrated Household Survey – the largest social survey in the UK, covering over 400,000 households a year. The sheer amount of well-being data that will be collected will be unprecedented. This is excellent news.
Of course, as the Head of Centre for Well-Being Charles Seaford has said, “the devil will be in the detail”. There are two particular details in this case. Firstly what is being measured: The ONS is likely to collect data on three or four questions – probably including the life satisfaction question used in the Happy Planet Index. This is a start but, as our work on National Accounts of Well-Being argues, well-being is more complicated than this and needs to be handled in a more nuanced way if policy is to be decided based on it.
And that brings us to the second detail. What will Cameron do with all this data? He has promised that government will take seriously the data and use it to inform policy. As one Downing Street source said, “next time we have a comprehensive spending review, let's not just guess what effect various policies will have on people's well-being. Let’s actually know.” Too right. David Cameron’s speech delivered on the 25th November acknowledged that sometimes choices will have to be made between policies that maximise well-being and those that maximise growth. If well-being is taken seriously, that means going for the former.
And, as the Happy Planet Index makes painfully clear, there is no little point trying to maximise well-being in the present if we don’t consider the resource use associated with that well-being. If the government were able to boost the nation’s well-being, this would not be success unless that was coupled with a radically shrinking ecological footprint. The only way we can get a true picture of progress is if well-being and environmental impact are measured side-by-side. So far no one in government has suggested this will happen.
So, a step in the right direction, yes, but we are still some way from a government committed to good lives that don’t cost the Earth. Perhaps it is worth looking at Ecuador, in Latin America, where the constitution describes the nation’s goals around the indigenous concept of “Buen vivir” (good living). “Buen vivir” is a philosophy more than a measurement: living well, whilst in harmony with others and the planet. I imagine that if we all took that philosophy more seriously, we’d see some rapidly rising HPIs in the next update.
