Caught in a trap?
Think tank: PBE
Author(s): Jon Franklin; Marie Horton; Dr Beth Kitson; Matthew Whittaker
July 2, 2025
This report from UK think tank PBE explores low wellbeing in the UK today.
What comprises a decent life? It’s a hard question to definitively answer, with any individual’s response likely to differ from their neighbour’s (and even from their own answer five years in the future). Money is, of course, an important factor, and it’s right that a society that cares about the quality of life of all its citizens should have a clear focus on raising average incomes and on lowering the numbers who live in poverty and with material deprivation. But focusing purely on the financial situation of the nation’s households isn’t enough. What about our health (physical and mental), the conditions in which we live, and the quality of our connections to people around us? There is no single answer to the question and, therefore no single, objective economic measure that we can rely on to provide a complete picture of the state of the nation. If we want to know how people are doing, we need to simply ask them.
This question has been posed across a host of regular government and academic surveys since 2011. As such, we have an increasingly rich understanding of the self-reported quality of life – or wellbeing – of people across the UK. We, therefore, also have an increasingly detailed understanding of just what it is that moves the dial on the wellbeing of the nation – for better and for worse. As a result, we should be better able to understand the policy approaches that we might take, as a country, to do more to help a higher number of people have the decent quality of life that everyone deserves.
In this report, the second of our annual state-of-the-nation series, we dive into this data and explore what it can tell us. Our hope is that the findings we present and the discussion we open will help to inform a wider understanding of the approach we should be taking as a nation – in the public, private and social sectors – to better collectively tackle both the causes and consequences of the country’s wellbeing poverty.
