Sarah Davidson, CEO at Carnegie UK
“The main purpose of Government should be to improve the wellbeing of the people”. This is the shared rallying cry of the wellbeing movement in the UK. Uniting around this goal is more important than ever right now, given the current state of the nation’s wellbeing and how little consideration governments seem to be giving to whether it’s getting any better.
A bleak picture of national wellbeing
The latest Carnegie UK Life in the UK annual index of collective wellbeing tells a story of persistent inequality and wellbeing stagnation, the data suggesting a society struggling against a tide of inequality, poverty and democratic alienation. This year’s update to the index will be out in the autumn, but the complementary World Wellbeing Movement’s 2025 UK Wellbeing Report on subjective wellbeing is already available. It tells a story that is “even bleaker” than its 2024 findings, with a 10% increase in those living below the “Happiness Poverty Line”. And we’ll get more data and discussion next week, when PBE publishes its own Low wellbeing in the UK report.
If improving our wellbeing is the main purpose of the governments of the UK, then we might reasonably conclude that they have a job on their hands. Is there any evidence that they are actively engaged on that task?
What gets measured is not driving action
Key to answering this question is an examination of what our governments measure and how that information is used to assess and drive progress. Ed Humpherson’s earlier essay in this series articulated eloquently the widely accepted argument that Gross Domestic Product is a poor measure of social progress and national wellbeing. To an extent, these shortcomings have already been acknowledged by governments across the UK, which have invested in new datasets to inform policy. Since 2011, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has maintained a dashboard of wellbeing indicators, while Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland all have wellbeing outcome frameworks of one sort or another.
At Carnegie UK, we define wellbeing as everyone having what they need to live well now and in the future. Not just our individual (subjective) wellbeing, but that of our communities and society as a whole; not just today, but for generations to come. We understand this “collective wellbeing” as manifesting across four dimensions: social, economic, environmental and democratic. Policy makers need to be able to delve deeply into how each of these aspects of wellbeing is being experienced by people in different places and in different circumstances – and recognise how that experience is changing over time.
It is only when governments understand this picture in the round that they can focus attention on where action and investment are most needed. In an era of severe fiscal constraints, there can be no excuse for failing to focus public spending and investment plans on known wellbeing gaps and building resilience for the challenges to come.
How well equipped are governments to identify those gaps, the places where wellbeing is currently falling short? I would argue that there is no shortage of data, meaning that the failure is one of applying that knowledge to the job at hand.
The ONS wellbeing dashboard has evolved since its inception, and currently consists of 60 individual measures, grouped across ten topic areas. However, insofar as Whitehall has ever paid any attention to these measures, the focus for policy making and investment appraisal has tended to be the so-called “ONS 4” – the personal wellbeing measures used to tell a story about our anxiety levels, happiness and life satisfaction. While these certainly provide an important narrative, it is a partial one which policy makers must complement with other data and evidence to paint a fully rounded picture of the wellbeing of the people.
The ONS has recently announced that from November 2025 it intends to focus its quarterly wellbeing reporting on a smaller set of measures in the National Well-being dashboard; we have yet to see this sub-set, so it is hard to come to a conclusion about the merits of the approach. It really matters whether the ONS preserves breadth of coverage in the reduced set of measures, and the litmus test will be whether Government Departments use it to shape policy and resource allocation any more than they do the current 60.
Turning frameworks into outcomes
Meanwhile in the devolved governments, there is increasing frustration that despite the existence of holistic wellbeing outcome frameworks with accompanying indicators, there is still a palpable disconnect between policy intention and policy practice and outcomes. Scotland’s National Performance Framework, Wales’ Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, and Northern Ireland’s PfG Wellbeing Framework all provide population-level indicators that are designed to align the efforts of central and local government, arms-length bodies, and the third sector to achieve specified outcomes. However, unless the frameworks are used as intended to prioritise interventions, guide investment and shape behaviours, they cannot of themselves lead to improvements in wellbeing. The growing gap between rhetoric and reality is not going unnoticed by the many people whose lives are not visibly improving.
Overall, our governments have yet to convince us that they are using the available wellbeing data to focus policy and allocate resources in ways that will drive long-term improvements across society.
This arguably matters more than ever right now, given the collapse in trust in our existing democratic institutions. Our research shows very low levels of trust in politics and government across the UK. Those whose lives are the hardest experience the lowest democratic wellbeing, but the scores are poor right across the country. It appears that the people themselves broadly agree that their governments had one job, and that they are failing at it.
The OECD tells us that use and communication of evidence in policy-making matter strongly for trust. If we want our political institutions to command confidence and retain legitimacy, then we must hold them to account for transparency in the collection and application of the evidence about how we are all living. The implications of a continued failure to meaningfully put wellbeing at the centre of decision-making should concern us all, and as a movement it’s time we rallied together and pressed home that case.
This article is the third in PBE’s new ‘Economics to improve lives’ series that explores a question at the heart of PBE’s mission: How do we ensure that wellbeing – the quality of life experienced by individuals – is the ultimate goal of government?
We’re bringing together thinkers and commentators from across economics, policy, academia, media and civil society to challenge conventional wisdom and consider how we might build an approach to measuring economic success that puts the lived realities of people at its heart and fits the times we live in. Opinions are the author’s own.