For a nation to be sustainable and strong, the economic policies that support it need to be inclusive and comprehensive. Misery increases discontent, ambivalence and illness. It affects our individual and collective performance and resilience, as well as the strength of our collective decision-making and our national security.
What Works Wellbeing Centre’s Executive Director, Nancy Hey outlines what we know about the drivers of wellbeing on a national, regional and individual level – and what we think the government should focus on in order to truly ‘level up’ life in the UK.In order to ‘level up’ life satisfaction, we need to:
Have an aim of sustainable overall social progress
Focus on outcomes that matter to people’s lives at an national average level, but also between and within regions
Measure these outcomes, – both objectively and subjectively – our progress towards them and their sustainability over time, openly, as a shared evidence base.
One option is a regular independent and authoritative analysis of how people and places are doing across the UK, along with a short and long term analysis of risk and costs covering economic, social and environmental progress across all sectors.  Read more