Wellbeing across the UK

Much has been said and written about moving towards an economy that prioritises human wellbeing and looks beyond traditional economic measures of prosperity. The importance of this is self-evident but it can be difficult to see how it translates into practice. While various dashboards and frameworks exist, using these to reach meaningful conclusions on the overall state of progress is challenging.

This is what drove the team at BiGGAR Economics to embark on an internal research project earlier this year to investigate the distribution of wellbeing across the UK.

The project considered how wellbeing varies between different parts of the UK and what drives these differences. This post marks the publication of the findings from this endeavour.

Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years

The metric we chose to help answer these questions was wellbeing-adjusted life years, or WELLBYs.

WELLBYs provide a consistent and robust metric that can be used to measure wellbeing across time and geography. They are calculated by multiplying a subjective wellbeing score (measured by life satisfaction) by average life expectancy. Reliable statistics for both are available at local authority level, which enabled us to estimate WELLBYs for each local authority area in the UK.

The results are striking (see map). The map illustrates average WELLBYs per person for every local authority in the UK (hover to see the name of the local authority area and associated WELLBYs score).

The Distribution of Wellbeing

The disparity in WELLBYs across the UK is vast. The average for the UK is 614 WELLBYs but there is a wide distribution of almost 130 WELLBYs between the lowest (City of Glasgow with 553 WELLBYs) and the highest (Orkney Islands with 681 WELLBYs).

For those of us living in Scotland these disparities are particularly remarkable. Scotland contains two of the local authorities with the highest WELLBYs in the UK (Orkney and the Western Isles) and five of the 10 local authorities with the lowest average WELLBYs per person (Inverclyde, Dundee City, North Ayrshire, West Dunbartonshire and Glasgow City).

Delving further into these disparities revealed something else: for areas where average wellbeing is highest, life satisfaction is a more important driver than life expectancy. But for areas with the lowest wellbeing per person, life expectancy is more important.

WELLBYs provide a consistent way of comparing wellbeing between areas and across time, making them potentially useful for policymakers. They provide a way of evaluating the effect of policy changes on human wellbeing directly rather than through proxy measures (like GDP per head). They can also enable policy objectives to be defined explicitly in wellbeing terms.

What Drives Wellbeing?

But to apply WELLBYs in practice, policy makers need to know what to focus on. What are the factors that drive wellbeing?

There is a robust and increasing body of literature around this question, which shows:

While the beneficial effect of high income is smaller than often believed, poverty is a major cause of misery and unemployment is particularly harmful.
Positive relationships and a strong community are important as is the quality of the physical environment. While exposure to nature enhances wellbeing, urban dereliction has the opposite effect.
When it comes to differences among countries six factors are particularly important: trust, generosity, social support, freedom, income, and health.
The single biggest predictor of adult wellbeing is emotional health at age 16 and although mental and physical health are both important, poor mental health explains more of the misery in society than any other factor.

While all of these factors are important, the idea that adult wellbeing is heavily dependent on emotional health at adolescence is particularly striking. Coupled with the knowledge that poor mental health explains more of the misery in society than any other factor helps bring what really matters in life into sharp focus.

WELLBYs provide a useful tool for measuring wellbeing and can have profound implications for public policy. They have the potential to transform human wellbeing from a policy aspiration to a practical and measurable policy objective and help move towards an economy that truly prioritises human wellbeing.

Wellbeing across the UK

Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years

The Distribution of Wellbeing

What Drives Wellbeing?

Further Reading