Environmental Audit CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by The Academy of Social Sciences
1.1 The Academy of Social Sciences welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) Inquiry on Well-being.
1.2 The Academy of Social Sciences is the UK’s national academy for social sciences, and counts 46 of the social science Learned Societies and over 900 peer-elected social scientists amongst its membership. Our membership includes both research-active academics in Universities and wider communities of professional and applied researchers in the social sciences. We have organised our response under the headings provided by the Committee.
The Government’s plans to utilise the results of the available well-being research and analysis in policy making.
2.1 The Academy of Social Sciences welcomes the Government’s work in the field of well-being and its willingness to incorporate well-being perspectives into policymaking, and to see well-being as a goal of social progress. The ONS work on well-being has enabled robust measurement of well-being at a national level in the UK for the first time.
2.2 Well-being is a complex concept, with many dimensions. We support a holistic view of well-being that emerges from the research literature, showing that wellbeing is more than the absence of illness or pathology. It has subjective (self-assessed) and objective (ascribed) dimensions and can be measured at the level of individuals or society.
2.3 The ONS measures of subjective well-being currently concentrate on measures of life satisfaction and reported levels of (respectively) happiness and anxiety yesterday. Given the importance in psychological definitions of well-being of accounting for negative as well as positive affect, it may be beneficial to look to develop an indicator of unhappiness/low mood as well, as anxiety is only one aspect of negative mood affecting our levels of well-being and mental health.
2.4 Whilst the current measures also include an item on the extent to which respondents see their lives as worthwhile, there is a growing consensus that measures of engagement are important to overall well-being and to a sense of fulfilment. This engagement includes personal, social and community relationships and its importance is underlined by the association frequently found between participation in relationships and community activities and levels of well-being for individuals and for societies. In light of this, we endorse the suggestion in the Committee’s report on Sustainable Development Indicators that proposed social capital indicators may include:
“sense of belonging”, “trusting neighbours”, “neighbourliness”, “volunteering and other community participation”, “influencing local decisions”, “feeling safe” and “mixing socially”
(HC 667, 2012:14)
2.5 We note that the EAC inquiry starts from a point of view that “Well-being comprises four “capitals”—natural capital, produced capital, human capital and social capital”. This is only one (economistic) view of the nature of well-being and its constituents—other views in the social sciences may see well-being more as a “flow” concept, moving through time and social space, rather than a static “stock” resource. Economic perspectives may characterise well-being as arising from services that flow from stocks of capital—a notion that has expanded beyond physical and financial stocks to include natural, social and human capital stocks: eg services flowing from human capital (education, skills); services deriving from measures of social capital (such as connectedness, cohesion and participation). We encourage the Committee to attend to these wider and more dynamic versions of capital in considering well-being and policy—as is already being done to some extent in the work of the Natural Capital Committee.
2.6 We draw the Committee’s attention to the well-being research carried out by social scientists throughout the UK to enrich the work carried out by ONS. Resources such as the Understanding Society data, housed at the University of Essex, and the recent reports of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (both outlined in more detail below) provide valuable insights into the nature and experience of well-being in Britain today.
What the Government is doing to get the right analytical skills and training (including social science skills), to reflect well-being thinking and to address all aspects of sustainable development; and how in practical terms to make such an approach operational in departments’ policy-making processes.
3.1 “Well-being thinking” is interdisciplinary by nature, bringing together economics, quantitative and qualitative social research, environmental science and ecology and psychology—among other social and natural sciences. The Government’s support of interdisciplinary research funding under cross-cutting themes is likely to produce findings relevant to well-being research and policy, and to foster the cross-subject collaboration likely to nurture the skills and approaches to take the well-being agenda forward.
3.2 Civil service reform currently underway emphasises the need for civil servants to move more between departments and break down thinking silos in policymaking. This is relevant to the well-being agenda which spans the work of many Departments, including Defra, DCLG, Health, and DWP. Bob Kerslake has talked recently of the importance of policy being formulated interdepartmentally where appropriate, with various Departments coming together to “organise around the problem”. Measuring, nurturing and enhancing levels of well-being are an inter-departmental challenge, which may benefit from such an approach.
3.2 Well-being research rests on a set of quantitative subjective and objective indicators, and statistical analysis to map associations between dimensions of well-being and a range of variables. Most social scientists gain quantitative skills through Masters degrees, which are not often publicly-funded. The Academy is keeping a watching brief on the issues raised by this lack of funding, both for the “pipeline” of skilled social scientists coming into employment, and around inequalities of access to Masters training, between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds.
What particular areas of policy making the Government should now open up to the results of the well-being analysis and research, and on which areas of policy-making it should exercise caution.
4.1 We recommend that policymaking related to community capacity building and regeneration should be opened up to the results of well-being research. Participation in society is so important to positive well-being and levels of trust, that the flow of social and human capital into and out of deprived areas should be mapped and understood, alongside economic cost-benefit analysis related to specific projects and investments.
4.2 Recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Poverty, Participation and Choice: the legacy of Peter Townsend (2013) Ferragina, E Tomlison, M and Robert Walker York: JRF) indicates that a third of Britons don’t have the resources to participate fully in society. This report draws on a long tradition from sociology understanding poverty in a rounded sense (from Peter Townsend’s groundbreaking report on poverty in the 1970s). The poorest 30% participate less in social relationships, cultural activities and membership of organisations and have lower levels of trust in others, as well as possessing fewer material goods. The non-economic aspects of poverty highlighted here are related to the calls for a more holistic sense of well-being, and draw attention to questions of equity and social justice. There is scope for the ONS work on well-being to explore these matters more fully.
4.3 There are strong arguments not only that the poorest in society suffer adverse well-being effects in themselves, but also that more unequal societies suffer from lower wellbeing as a whole. This view is summarised by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) in their influential book “The Spirit Level”. They argue that:
“It is clear that greater equality, as well as improving the wellbeing of the whole population, is also key to national standards of achievement and how countries perform in lots of different fields …If you want to know why one country does better or worse that another, the first thing to look at is the extent of inequality. There is not one policy for reducing inequality in health or the educational performance of school children, and another for raising national standards of performance. Reducing inequality is the best way of doing both” (Wilkinson and Pickett (2009): 29–30)
4.4 The gap in income between the richest and poorest in society has been rising in recent decades in the UK, resulting in an increasingly unequal society. This may be reflected in a growing well-being gap with implications for the effectiveness of government policies. The importance of (in)equality in ongoing work on well-being and sustainable development was recognised in the EAC’s recent report on developing further indicators: “Equality is at the heart of the Society pillar of sustainable development, but it is not given sufficient coverage in the proposed SDIs to provide a basis for policy-making to narrow inequalities.” (HCC 667: 15). We encourage the Committee to continue to advocate for the importance of indicators of equality.
4.5 Whilst personal and social relationships are key to well-being, Government prescriptions in such areas are often unpopular. People tend to prefer to make private choices to, for example, marry or engage in volunteer work, rather than do so by Government edict. Policies in such areas must therefore be sensitive to issues of autonomy, democracy and trust—all important factors in well-being in themselves.
How the ONS work might be further expanded or adjusted to reflect well-being research and metrics being developed elsewhere.
5.1 The work of the ONS on well-being is supported, informed and subject to challenge through robust, independent data on wellbeing. Independent sources such as Understanding Society and the birth cohort studies therefore warrant continued investment and support. It may be possible to develop indicators of well-being retrospectively from existing datasets, enhancing our ability to examine changes in well-being over time, and the relative importance of various determinants.
5.2 ONS’s own data on well-being could be made more accessible through improvements to the website. This would ensure that it reached the widest possible audience, and encourage dialogue between Government and independent researchers in this area.
What lessons for considering social and human capital in national statistics reporting and policy making could be drawn from the separate work already under way on natural capital, including the operation of the Natural Capital Committee.
6.1 The Natural Capital Committee (NCC) works to better measure and account for changes in natural capital assets and to feed this knowledge into policymaking. We feel that there is a good case to establish a similar Social and Human Capital Committee, bringing insights directly to bear on policy decisions. A Social and Human Capital Committee could work to complement our understandings of economic success and economic determinants of well-being, with a socially-based well-being perspective. This would enable us to answer better questions such as “what would policy look like if individual and societal well-being were our focus, rather than GDP?”
6.2. The EAC’s report on Sustainable Development Indicators has drawn attention to the importance of aiming to integrate well-being and environmental indicators into a holistic view of sustainable development for growth. The NCC’s State of Natural Capital report states that: “In order to promote sustainable growth, all forms of capital (natural, human, social and manufactured) need to be properly maintained and where appropriate, enhanced” (page 8).Therefore social and human capital deserve to be put at the heart of policy and viewed as integral to plans for growth.
14 June 2013