Wellbeing should be a core part of public service design

15 Feb 19

The wellbeing of people can have a significant effect on public services, argues the Resolution Foundation’s George Bangham. 

Happy girls in the city

 

For the past eight years, the British government has been surveying the public to ask how happy they are feeling. Is this wellbeing data a frivolous extra, or a serious tool that policymakers can use to guide future public service reform? At the Resolution Foundation we think it’s the latter, having analysed the data in detail.

Subjective wellbeing data allows a revolutionary approach to public administration. It measures how people’s lives are going, not in the pounds and pence of GDP, but by asking them to rate things from their own perspective.

For public services, it offers a way to measure how different services impact on people’s lives for better or worse.

Rather than making ad-hoc comparisons between different customer surveys, it allows us to compare the effectiveness of, say, different approaches to rehabilitation on the well-being of programme participants.

When setting overall public spending priorities, wellbeing data shows us statistically what services are most important for people’s quality of life. In our regression analysis of the factors that predict people’s self-assessed well-being, the key factors are people’s health, relationships and jobs.

Health is the strongest factor of all: someone who assesses their own health as good is highly likely to be generally happy and satisfied with life.

This, surely, is a strong further argument for health spending, and on mental health in particular. In economic terms too, academic studies show that firms with happy workers tend to be more productive.

On employment, wellbeing data confirms the common intuition that unemployment hurts, but it tells us more than that. It shows that the wellbeing loss from losing a job is bigger than the wellbeing boost from getting back to work, with this effect being bigger in some regions than others.

It also shows that people on temporary contracts, or working unwanted hours, feel worse off.


‘This evidence confirms that the recent jobs boom has had a (modest) positive impact on the nation’s well-being. It also underlines the importance of boosting job quality, and reducing the number of people cycling in and out of unemployment.’


This evidence confirms that the recent jobs boom has had a (modest) positive impact on the nation’s well-being. It also underlines the importance of boosting job quality, and reducing the number of people cycling in and out of unemployment.

People’s houses are another key factor determining their well-being. Homeowners are happiest of all.

But, given that millennials are only half as likely to own a home at age 30 as baby boomers were, we have to face up to the fact that many of today’s younger people will never own their homes.

Rather than focusing all our efforts into trying to help a few in ‘generation rent’ to get on the housing ladder, we need a concerted effort to raise housing quality and long-run security in the rented sector too.

For private renters, that means bringing in longer, secure tenancies and more predictable rent increases. For social renters, that means building a new generation of social housing, in the places where people want it.

Lastly, how about the happiest economic status of all, retirement? Seventy-year-olds who are recently retired report some of the best well-being of anyone.

The UK has made great strides over the past 20 years in reducing pensioner poverty, but there are concerns over the adequacy of the retirement incomes of today’s workers. A combined push from policy makers, employers and workers is needed to ensure that people are saving enough to provide for their later years.

Well-being data is still in its infancy as a tool for serious policymaking, but it has great potential that is only starting to be realised. It is a complement, not a replacement, to traditional metrics, and it shows that the nation’s well-being is best raised by smart economic reforms on jobs, health and housing.

Wellbeing isn’t a topic to park in the nice-to-have box for policymakers to tinker with. It should be a core part of public service design and delivery for the future.

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