10 pointers to happiness: Government begins measuring well-being

7^th November 2011 - Are you happy with your relationship, satisfied with your job and content with where you live? These are three of the questions out of ten that the government will be using to measure whether we are happy with life or miserable with our lot.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has announced the start of a consultation on how it can assess the UK's progress by more than just its economic performance.

Wealth of nations

It became clear a year ago that the country's statisticians had been asked to deliver on a commitment made by David Cameron long before he became prime minister to find a new way of calculating the nations's performance other than our gross domestic product. In 2006, Mr Cameron told a conference: "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being."

Since then, a worldwide recession and a crisis in the Eurozone have focused attention on whether we should see our progress in terms of prosperity and growth or whether we should set our sights on achieving 'life's goals'.

Collecting these kinds of statistics will put the UK at the forefront of new thinking into how people and nations can measure themselves.

10 'happiness' questions

Fieldworkers have already started asking a limited number of questions along these lines as part of the Integrated Household Survey. Now, the ONS has set out the 10 measures it believes will more effectively test our nation's sense of well-being. The topics proposed are:

• Individual well-being
• Our relationships
• Health
• What we do
• Where we live
• Personal finance
• Education and skills
• Governance
• The economy
• The natural environment

The consultation will run for 12 weeks and the results will be published in April 2012.

Turning figures into policies

"It's great that we have a leader in Cameron saying that there's more to life than just GDP, but there's a huge difference between measuring and paying lip service to this and then taking action," says Mark Williamson, director of Action for Happiness.

The movement was established earlier this year with the aim of promoting social change through the creation of a happier society.

Action for Happiness, which has recruited 17,763 members from 119 countries, says that for half a century we have pursued higher incomes without achieving higher levels of happiness, while spawning an increase in depression, anxiety and wider social problems. Among its members, the movement boasts well known figures like the Dalai Lama, film director Dave Putnum and Olympic rower Steve Redgrave.

Action for Happiness emerged during the gloomy worldwide economic crisis, but it sprung largely from the work of Lord Layard, a Labour peer and economist at the London School of Economics, whose book Happiness: Lessons from a new science, published in 2005, argued that spending was an unreliable measure of success.