INTERVIEW
Paul Allin
As the government and the Offi ce for National Statistics embark on a project to measure the UK’s wellbeing, director of the project Paul Allin speaks to Magali Robathan about the challenges of the project and the role of leisure
ess of developing a new critieria to become one of the fi rst countries to measure its citizens’ wellbeing. “There’s an emerging feeling inter- nationally that there’s more to life than Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” says Paul Allin, the director of the project to measure national wellbeing at the Offi ce for National Statistics (ONS). “We want to be able to look at the progress of the UK and how things are changing, not just in eco-
F
or a long time, the meas- ure of a country’s success has been its economic performance. Now the UK government is in the proc-
nomic terms but in terms of quality of life, the environment and the sustain- ability of what we do.” The £2m project to measure well-
being in the UK was launched last November by the prime minister David Cameron and the national statistician Gill Matheson. Stage one is a national consultation, ending in April, with the public, organisations, businesses and government across the UK being asked what wellbeing means to them. The aim of the project is to come up with an accepted set of meas- ures for national wellbeing, which could be published on a regular basis to help assess the national mood alongside more objective measures such as economic performance, lev- els of unemployment and crime rates. These measures, said Cameron, speaking at the launch: “Could give us a general picture of whether life is improving” and “lead to government policy that is more focused not just on the bottom line, but on all those things that make life worthwhile”. Cameron added that: “We will con- tinue to measure GDP as we’ve always done, but it is high time we admitted that, taken on its own, GDP is an incomplete way of measuring a country’s progress.”
COURTING CONTROVERSY The project is both ambitious and controversial. Ambitious, because measuring something as subjective as wellbeing is fraught with challenges, and controversial, because it’s been slammed as a waste of money at a time when the government should be concentrating on reviving the economy. Allin, however, stands by the deci- sion to launch the project. “It’s great that there’s a feeling that there’s more to a country’s success than GDP. If this project gives us space to explore that, as is happening across Europe and the world, then that’s a good thing to do,” he says. “We’re very conscious that we have to be very cost-effective in what we do and we’re not frivolous with tax payers’ money.” As for the criticism that now is
the wrong time to be measuring the wellbeing of the nation, against a backdrop of job losses and wide- spread cuts, Allin says: “It reached a stage when there was such strong international and national interest that it made it the right time to do this.”
THE ROLE OF LEISURE It’s generally accepted that there are strong links between people’s well- being and the way they spend their
“Leisure impacts on lives in so many ways. We want to gather as many examples showing the link between leisure and wellbeing as possible to help us with our measurements”
ISSUE 2 2011 © cybertrek 2011
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