Debate begins on measuring national wellbeing

Cameron (pictured) says he wants to start “measuring our progress as a country not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life”.

He said: “We’ll continue to measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as we’ve always done, but it is high time we admitted that, taken on its own, GDP is an incomplete way of measuring a country’s progress.”

The National Wellbeing Project, led by Matheson, involves a public consultation and an online survey (available here) that aims to identify “the key areas which matter most for national wellbeing, and good ways of showing figures which people recognise as telling a story which reflects their experiences,” she said.

“There is no shortage of numbers that could be used to construct measures of wellbeing, but they will only be successful if they are widely accepted and understood,” said Matheson. “We want to develop measures based on what people tell us matters most.”

Matheson says these “subjective measures” will supplement existing objective measures of wellbeing. The plan is for new questions to be added to large household surveys produced by the Office for National Statistics from April.

UPDATE: Is measuring wellbeing at a time of austerity such a wise move? Datamonitor thinks not. The firm says Cameron’s new ‘happiness’ index may struggle to capture the true feelings of Britons, and instead pick up short-term negative feelings rather than the more meaningful and long-term ones associated with life in the UK.

It cites research that shows 40% of UK consumers aren’t happy with the direction the country is heading and 45% feel worse off financially compared to what they did last year.

Analyst Michael Hughes said: “Although six out of ten UK consumers indicate that they are happy with their overall quality of life, the short-term future outlook of the country and their own wellbeing continues to weigh heavily on their mind. Therefore we believe that the survey is more likely to pick up on these short term negative feelings – particularly as the first survey will take place after the imposed austerity measures have come into practice.”