Five years on from lockdown, how are we all doing?

By PBE CEO Matt Whittaker

Remarkably, next month marks the five-year anniversary of the first national lockdown of the Covid pandemic. As surreal as it was tragic, it’s a period that turned so much of our lives upside down and yet is one that many of us have banished to the outer reaches of our memory. There have been lasting changes in the way we work, with the debate over the right balance of office-based and home-based working continuing to play out. And there are shared experiences which will serve as reference points for society for many years to come. But, five years on, how has the condition of the country changed? How are we doing as a nation? 

There is of course no simple answer to that question, not least because there are any number of different ways of measuring a country’s ‘condition’. But one straightforward – and ultimately quite compelling – means of approaching it is to simply ask the nation’s citizens how they feel. And happily, that’s something the ONS has been doing on a very regular basis since the first weeks of lockdown.  

Captured first on a weekly, then fortnightly and now monthly basis, the insights provided by responses to the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey have given a near real-time glimpse of the mood of the nation over an extraordinary period in time. And the latest release, published this morning, paints a somewhat troubling picture of the wellbeing of the country as we approach the landmark of the five-year lockdown anniversary. 

Figure 1 begins with a focus on the level of satisfaction that people report with their lives. This is just one of the ‘ONS4’ measures of wellbeing, but is typically taken to be the best proxy for the overall mood of the nation. It describes a very clear drop in the average life satisfaction score recorded by adults in Great Britain as the first lockdown and the trauma of the pandemic took hold, followed by a rapid rebound as things began to normalise in 2021.  

Yet reported wellbeing subsequently deteriorated again through 2022, albeit more gently. Since then, average life satisfaction has been relatively consistent meaning it remains stubbornly short of the levels recorded immediately pre-lockdown. Data from the latest ONS release – covering the three months ending January 2025 – puts the average score at 6.9 out of 10, relative to a score of 7.0 ahead of the first lockdown and a peak of 7.1 in the second half of 2021. 

This difference may feel quite modest, but following HM Treasury’s approach to putting a pounds and pence value on an individual’s wellbeing suggests the satisfaction gap recorded relative to pre-Covid is currently worth an average of £665 per adult – or £36.8 billion when aggregated across Britain. And it comes despite the fact that average disposable income – after adjusting for inflation – has risen very modestly over this same period. As a nation we’ve become a little richer, yet we feel less content. 

Of course, averages can be misleading and perhaps the more important question is the extent to which any wellbeing scarring is being shared across the population. Figure 2 provides a means of understanding this by showing the trend in the proportion of adults recording low life satisfaction (i.e. scoring 4 or below out of 10).  

Overall, it presents a similar trend to the average. Namely, a sharp deterioration in the early stages of the pandemic followed by an initial rebound that quickly converts into resettlement at a level that falls short of the pre-pandemic norm.  

More specifically, the proportion of adults reporting low levels of life satisfaction has climbed from an initial 9.5% at the start of the series in 2020 and a post-pandemic low of 7.9% in the autumn of 2021, to a rate of 10.0% in the latest three-month period (ending January 2025). Add in population growth in this period and that equates to an additional 490,000 people in Great Britain living below what we might consider to be a wellbeing poverty line. 

Underpinning these modest but meaningful apparent drops in overall life satisfaction or wellbeing, the ONS release provides evidence of some potentially more structural shifts too. For example, Figure 3 shows how the proportion of adults declaring themselves to be lonely ‘often’, ‘always’ or ‘some of the time’ has drifted consistently upwards over the period since the start of the pandemic.  

Again, the impact of the pandemic is very evident, with a spike in loneliness through 2020. But on this occasion the rebound that is recorded in 2021 more than reverses over subsequent years. From a pre-pandemic low of 23.2%, the proportion of adults reporting feeling lonely jumped to 26.5% through the early stages of Covid. Having fallen someway back in 2021, it climbed consistently through 2023 and 2024. The latest release puts the figure for the three months to January 2025 at 26.0% – down on the levels recorded at the height of the first lockdown, but only just. 

Structural deterioration in a key component of the nation’s condition is even more evident when we turn our attention to the health of our population. Figure 4 sets out the proportion of adults reporting their health to be ‘good’ or ‘very good’ in the period since the start of the first lockdown, and it stands out relative to the other charts presented here for the near-invisibility of the pandemic in the trendline. That is, self-reported health fell sharply through 2020 but continued to do so at more or less the same pace through 2021 and 2022. 

The trend has flattened somewhat since then, but the latest release shows that just 66.0% of adults in Britain rated their health as good or very good in the three months to January 2025, down from 73.6% on the eve of the first lockdown. That’s equivalent to an additional 2.6 million adults failing to declare good health across the country.  

All of this data comes with a health warning – the timeliness provided by the increased frequency of the ONS survey comes with a trade-off in terms of sample size. The confidence intervals included on each of the charts highlights both the uncertainty that surrounds the central estimates and the potential ‘noise’ that might exaggerate near-term movements in any single series.  

But stepping back to look at the overall direction of travel across this range of key metrics over the five years since the first national lockdown, we can discern a relatively clear picture of how we’re doing: not as well as we were, and not as well as we could be. 

As our recent major audit of the wellbeing of the nation showed, how we feel is very closely linked to our health (both mental and physical) and the level of connection we enjoy with each other. What’s most worrying in the ONS data, then, is less the failure to return to our pre-pandemic levels of life satisfaction, and more the apparently ongoing deterioration in self-reported health and loneliness. Add in disturbing data on trends in the mental health of our young people and it should be apparent that these are the key challenges facing the country in the years ahead.  

And yet, as it approaches its first Comprehensive Spending Review, the government is much more vocal about the twin challenges of establishing strong economic growth and gaining control over the public finances. These are important considerations for sure – more revenue provides more opportunities for investing in our health and our society. And there is a clear political reality underpinning the government’s focus given the visibility these topics have in the public consciousness. But we should collectively view them as contributors to a better country rather than the end goals themselves.   

In a week in which the ONS has published data on inflation, employment and government borrowing that has generated considerable coverage, commentary and criticism, today’s opinions and lifestyles release will likely go largely unnoticed. And yet it likely contains the most important insights of all.