UK Measuring National Well-being Programme

Introduction3 In 2010 ONS launched a programme of work on measuring national well-being. The aim of the programme is to develop and publish an accepted and trusted set of National Statistics which help people to understand and monitor national well-being. It will put together traditional economic measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with those which reflect the social and environmental aspects of society, including subjective well-being. The first phase of the programme was the national debate which ended on 15 April 2011. The purpose of this document is to summarise the key findings from the debate and outline the next steps in the measurement of national well-being. The report will be of interest to policy makers, academics, experts and members of the public with an interest in the subject of well-being. More detailed findings are available in a series of supplementary papers. The debate was set up to gather views on what matters to people and what influences their well- being. The findings are presented across four chapters. Chapter 1 summarises what we learned about what matters and how national well-being will be defined. Chapter 2 sets out the policy and international need for measures of national well-being, and highlights how measures may be used. Chapter 3 summarises how measures of national well-being will be developed and agreed. Chapter 4 outlines how work on measuring national well-being will be taken forward. Some work has already started, including: • research into measuring national well-being and the development of an outline framework using research and responses to the national debate (see Chapter 1) • working in collaboration with international organisations and other countries (see Chapter 2) • inclusion of questions on subjective well-being in the ONS Integrated Household Survey (IHS) (see Chapter 3) • proposals on the way we will select and evaluate measures of national well-being, to be published on the ONS website (see Chapter 3) • working with others including policy makers and academics (see Chapter 4) The following supplementary papers can be found online at www.ons.gov.uk/well- being/wellbeing/understanding-wellbeing/index.html: • findings from the national well-being debate • developing a framework for understanding and measuring national well-being • measuring children’s and young people’s well-being • measuring subjective well-being • measuring economic well-being