David Cameron is to make ministers use the happiness of voters as a yardstick before deciding on new policies.
All government policies, programmes and projects will be tested for their effect on people’s wellbeing in a move to make individual happiness a key indicator of their success.
Officials in Downing Street are drawing up proposals to add wellbeing to the indicators contained in The Green Book, the Treasury’s guide to how the government should appraise what it does.
Currently, ministers must test policies for economic, social and environmental impacts, as well as their effect on gender and race equality. They also need to carry out risk assessments of initiatives, from road closure programmes to the reform of the National Health Service.
Now, senior advisers to the prime minister are drawing up a set of indicators that will include whether the policy will increase “the sum total of human happiness” or make people more miserable and unfulfilled.
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The decision to add wellbeing to the factors used to judge whether a policy is going to work will draw on studies being carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which is spending £2m to devise an official index of the nation’s happiness.
The ONS has published the list of questions that it will use to measure whether people think they are happy. People are being asked to rate their own sense of wellbeing by judging a number of factors, such as whether they have a good relationship, health, spirituality or religion, job satisfaction, good connections with friends and relatives and involvement in personal activities, including volunteering. The happiness index will also measure whether people have a say on local and national issues, economic security and a stable income.
Among those working on the addition of wellbeing to The Green Book is David Halpern, a senior government adviser who heads a small unit in the Cabinet Office called the behavioural insight team. The so-called “nudge unit” looks at how changes in people’s behaviour, such as quitting smoking or helping elderly neighbours, can have a big impact on public policy and reduce spending.
Halpern disclosed at a seminar at the Institute for Government that happiness will become a vital ingredient in deciding future policy. He revealed that “work was going on to incorporate wellbeing into the Treasury Green Book”.
Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on wellbeing, and is also an aide to Vince Cable, the business secretary, welcomed the expansion of indicators to include happiness and said it could have a profound impact on how policy is formulated.
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The work builds on decisions by other countries to add happiness to the country’s measure of success.
Statisticians, social scientists and economists in Canada have already developed a national index of happiness.
In 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said a sense of wellbeing should be added to gross domestic product (GDP) data and should include factors such as long holidays and access to high-quality health care.
Academic studies have also shown that happiness is not always synonymous with the amount of money in people’s pockets.
Researchers at the University of Michigan found that people living in Latin American countries tended to say that they were happier than people in richer countries. The World Values Survey also found that people who had lived under communist rule were unhappier than people with similar incomes who lived elsewhere, even years after communism collapsed.
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Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom, has gone furthest in making happiness the goal of government. The king decided in 1972 to make GNH — gross national happiness — not GDP the country’s chief measure of success.
Additional reporting: Neha Patel