CWiPP and ONS Lecture: Life in the UK: 2012

Stephen Hicks, Assistant Deputy Director Measuring National

Wellbeing, Office for National Statistics

27 February 2013                                                 

The Measuring National Wellbeing programme was launched two years ago with a six month National Debate, asking, ‘what matters’, to understand what measures of well-being should include. The ONS developed a framework for measuring national wellbeing based on 34,000 on-line responses and 175 events that took place, one of which was with CWiPP members. The framework consists of 10 areas or ‘domains’, including areas such as Health, Education and What we do; and 40 headline measures of well-being, for example, the unemployment rate, satisfaction with our health, or levels of crime. These measures and others have been used to describe life in the UK 2012, under the headings, the Economy, People and the Environment.

As well as highlighting some of the findings from Life in the UK 2012, the lecture focused on how the ONS have and are developing measures of National Wellbeing, how subjective well-being measurement fits within the framework and how these statistics can be used by policy makers, the public and international bodies to make better decisions.