"a well-being manifesto"

Policies can’t make us happy or more engaged with life, but they can shape the culture and society in which we live. Many policies tend to focus on enhancing people’s income by growing the economy. This has only a small effect on well-being, however, and may be achieved at the expense of our time with others, the environment in which we live, or the vibrancy of local communities. This well-being manifesto suggests eight areas where government could act to promote well-being:

1. Measure what matters: A detailed set of national well-being accounts would allow us to understand well-being better and track changes over time. Local government could carry out well-being audits of their communities in order to help integrate their services and allocate their funds more effectively and efficiently.

2. Create a well-being economy: Growing the economy does not necessarily result in higher levels of well-being. So what directions should the economy take to promote well-being? High-quality work can profoundly affect our well-being by providing us with purpose, challenge, and opportunities for social relationships. It can constitute a meaningful part of our identity. There are many models of good workplaces whose lessons need to be drawn out and disseminated to employers. Well-being research provides many insights into what makes for good work. Unemployment has terrible effects on the well-being of the unemployed, but also lowers the well-being of the employed. Hidden unemployment in the UK is high, with many incapacity-benefit claimants able and willing to work but not counted in the unemployment figures. The Government needs to help these often hard-to-reach groups to find meaningful work. The well-being of future generations depends on not destroying our environment. We need to start moving towards a system of taxing environmental bad’s, such as fossil fuels, and reducing the tax burden on good’s, such as work. This could pay a double dividend of protecting the environment and improving people’s well-being.

3. Reclaim our time: We systematically over-estimate the amount of happiness extra income will bring us and work too many hours to get it. We fail to account for the fact that our expectations also rise with our incomes. Spending more time with our children, families, friends, and communities would bring us more happiness. We should start taking our productivity gains in the form of time. We should end individual opt-outs to the EU Working Time Directive and thus institute a maximum 48-hour working week. We could then reduce this maximum working week until we reach a maximum 35-hour week. This could be achieved whilst maintaining our present standards of living within around 15 years if accompanied by appropriate pension reform and a managed migration policy. We should accompany this with increased flexible working provisions and more bank holidays.

4. Create an education system that promotes flourishing: The purpose of the education system should be to create capable and emotionally well-rounded young people who are happy and motivated. At its heart, education policy must acknowledge that the best way of enabling people to realise their potential is to value them for who they are rather than their performance against targets. All schools should have a strategy to promote emotional, social and physical well-being. The curriculum needs to be broadened to include more opportunities around sports, arts, creativity, and other engaging activities. Early on in their lives, young people should be exposed to evidence about the kinds of satisfaction derived from different sorts of life choices, perhaps through broader study of what makes a ‘good life’. An education system which promotes flourishing will lead to higher productivity, a more entrepreneurial society, and greater active citizenship.

5. Refocus the health system to promote complete health: There are important links between health and well-being. The scale of the effect of psychological well-being on health is of the same order as traditionally identified risks such as body mass, lack of exercise, and smoking. The National Health Service (NHS) and other health institutions need to continue to broaden their focus to promote complete health, which is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". To do this, we need to accelerate the move towards a preventative health system. We also need to tackle mental health far more systematically. Treating people holistically means that health professionals need to go beyond just curing the biomedical causes of disease to thinking about the social and psychological aspects of how patients are treated. All health institutions should have some system in place to involve patients as partners in the business of delivering health; there needs to be investment in training frontline staff on good practice around this. Local authorities could promote healthier communities through encouraging local organisations, such as healthy living centres, to take the well-being agenda forward.

6. Invest in the very early years and parenting: Children need a lot of responsive individual attention in their first years, preferably from their parents. Cost-benefit analyses show that investment in the age group ‘zero to three’ will repay itself many times over, due to reduced health, education and social costs in the future.Parental leave should be extended to cover at least the first two years of a child’s life. This could be taken by either parent, or potentially shared between them. High-quality childcare should be subsidised for those parents who need, or wish, to work. Parents should also be actively supported to be the best parents they can be. This will require a mixture of community support, good local facilities, and education.

7. Discourage materialism and promote authentic advertising: We don’t become sexier and more attractive by switching brands of shampoo or buying a new car. So the media generally, and adverts specifically, should stop using imagery that suggests we do. Young children lack the critical capacity to distinguish between facts and selling messages. Materialism is not only bad for the environment, it also undermines our well-being. We should ban commercial advertising aimed at the under-eight’s, and have a strong code of conduct for such advertising for the under-16’s. A society more engaged in meaningful pastimes is likely to be less focused on the illusion that material goods will bring it happiness. We should endeavour to make the well-being choice the easy choice, to wean us off our national pastimes of shopping and TV watching. We need to increase support for cheap and local leisure provision, such as sports centres and arts venues, as well as informal open spaces and parks.

8. Strengthen civil society, social well-being and active citizenship: Being actively engaged with communities has been shown not only to give us a personal sense of well-being but also to have positive knock-on effects for others. This bolsters the case for government to support different sorts of community engagement and civil society organisations and spaces through, for example, a Citizen’s Service, a participation income, and mutual solutions such as reward cards and time banks. There is a link between well-being and democratic involvement that has implications for public-service delivery. We need to go beyond giving a choice of provider in public-service delivery to involving people in the design and delivery of the services they receive. We should also drop the swathes of central-government targets that service providers face and replace them with a process of stakeholder engagement and accountability which places the user in the centre.

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