Wellbeing

The Issue

Our society is making us ill

Our diet, how we spend our free time, our expectations of life, the way we are treated at work, the life we can afford on our wages, our sense of long-term security; over the last 50 years our economy has changed and it in turn has changed our lives enormously, and certainly not all for the good.

Our mental health is in decline. Our physical health is in decline. The quality of our working life is in decline. We are less financially secure, we are a much less equal society, we are stressed, don't have enough time for friends and family, the cohesion of our communities has weakened and our environment has deteriorated substantially.

Our politics has given up on our wellbeing and has focussed instead on helping us buy more things, as if that is the same as our wellbeing. It isn't. We need a politics which returns to the central focus it ought to have; not 'grow GDP', not 'increase international competitiveness' but improve the quality of life of our citizens.

The Alternative

an economy and society that makes our lives better

There are only a small number of things which humans really value:

  • Sufficiency – having enough to live a good life

  • Security – being confident you will still be able to have a good life next year

  • Respect – feeling that we are treated as valued members of our community

  • Purpose – believing that our life has meaning and is contributing to something bigger

  • Peace – the confidence that we will be safe, our lives free of violence and our minds free of anxiety and fear

  • Freedom – the chance to live as we want to live

  • Joy – the moments of euphoria, caring and love that lift our spirits

  • Health – to be as free as we can of illness and injury

  • Space – to be surrounded by a physical environment that helps us feel good, particularly with access to green space

At the moment our politics believes that all of the above are functions of growing GDP, despite the evidence to the contrary. The alternative to the mess in which we are living is to stop putting profit in front of all of these other outcomes, to stop believing that profit automatically creates peace, or freedom, or security.

A larger pay packet may help you to overlook being treated with increasing disrespect in your workplace, but the corrosive effect of disrespect is one you can't escape. You may be doing better financially, but if lots of others are not, one way or another you will not achieve the peace and safety you crave. More money will not increase the joy in your life; more time with friends will.

The alternative to a society that prioritises profit is a society which prioritises quality of life. A strong, productive economy is an important part of our national and personal wellbeing, but it is woefully short of being sufficient. What that economy produces and how, the way power and profit are distributed across that economy, the secondary harm that the economy does, the extent to which it generates tax revenues efficiently, the food it produces to feed you, the  house it builds you to live in – all of these will have a bigger effect on your personal quality of life than abstract measures of the nominal size of what we call 'the economy' but which is actually much more complicated than a single thing.
A nation of people with the time to spend being with friends and family, relaxing, pursuing hobbies and creating things for joy; a nation whose food makes us healthy and strong, whose houses keep us warm and secure, whose communities are good to live in; a nation of good health and good mental health where people have purpose and meaning; a nation where people do not fear for what they will eat today and do not fear for what they will eat tomorrow and the day after that; that is the alternative to a nation of ill, stressed, time-poor people anxious about the future and ever more impacted by a declining physical and mental space.

The Solution

Make better policy

If you set the goal of public policy in a way that produces negative outcomes, you've set the wrong goals. We make policy as if citizens are simply numbers on a spreadsheet, measuring society in terms of quantity but never quality, we will keep making bad policy. Whether at work or in our communities, policies and laws which do not increase our quality of life must be challenged.

All governments state that their number one, over-riding priority is increasing profits. They say this is because increasing profits create better pay and more tax. Except this isn't true; it depends on who takes the profits and what they do with them. No individual economic decision should be justified on the basis that 'it creates profit for someone'. All decisions should be justified on the basis that 'it creates increased quality of life for many people'. Of course we should support employers and business owners – in ratio to how much they are supporting their employees, their local community and how much they are impacting on public welfare.

We make policy on spreadsheets, not in communities and seldom for communities. We must reverse this, or we will keep making people's lives worse.

The To Do List

  • If what we are trying to do is improve quality of life for people (which governments say they are trying to do), then we should set quality of life as the main priority. Economic growth may support quality of life, but it can undermine it too. Growth in and of itself does not achieve quality of life. And since we know what really creates high quality of life (sufficiency, security, respect, purpose, peace, freedom, joy, health and space), we must make these our priorities, not one blunt, simplistic national goal (GDP growth) which benefits the wealthy most.

  • We claim to have a balance of indicators of governmental success, but the reality is that we only set policy to achieve one of them – GDP growth. Because our entire governmental apparatus is geared up to try and increase this single blunt statistic, our policy-making is equally blunt. It is not enough to say that we value other indictors as much as GDP, we must treat them with the same priority as GDP.

    We need a panel or dashboard of national-level indicators which cover the real priorities we have set ourselves to achieve greater quality of life. As well as 'Gross Domestic Product' we need 'Gross Domestic Health' (a measure of whether aggregate health is improving), 'Gross Domestic Mental Health' (the same for our minds), 'Gross National Anti-Social Crime' (are we getting safer), 'Gross Economic Sufficiency' (are we reducing poverty), 'Gross Economic Security' (we are increasing economic security', 'Gross Environmental Wellbeing' (is our air cleaner, our seas clearer, our wildlife thriving, our carbon emissions declining). It must be a limited, deliverable set of indicators and they must always and only be published together. If GDP is rising and all the other indicators are declining, then we know that the way we are raising GDP isn't working.

  • The factors which contribute to quality of life are more complicated and varied than the factors which contribute to business profitability – yet we keep setting up 'Councils Of Economic Advisers' but never 'Councils Of Quality Of Life Advisers'. There should be a statutory Council made up of experts in the fields of health, poverty, environment, economy, mental health, care and more. It should advise on policy and hold the government to account for its performance. Until we give our quality of life the status granted to the interests of the business community, we will always come second.

The Solution

Ensure sufficiency and security

People's quality of life starts by being able to afford a decent standard of living and not being worried about whether that standard of living can be maintained in the future. Or, put another way, if we have enough to live a decent life and the confidence that we can still live a decent life next year, the first step in achieving a high quality of life has been taken. Both people who can't afford the basics of life and people who are affluent now but constantly fear losing it are fighting an uphill battle. We do not prioritise either of these things – there are very few policies or strategies specifically aimed at ensuring everyone has sufficiency and there are almost no policies or strategies which focus on economic security. Making these goals a national priority would be an important first step.

The To Do List

  • There is no 'silver bullet' approach to achieving economic sufficiency and security, but a Universal Basic Income comes pretty close. Most social security benefits and most tax allowances would be scrapped and replaced with a single monthly payment to every citizen over 18 irrespective of their financial situation. Everyone would then pay tax on all their earned income. This could be introduced at a rate similar to the current Job Seekers Allowance on a cost-neutral basis, but that is not enough to achieve sufficiency or security. However once in place, every penny placed on tax and recycled through a Universal Basic Income to everyone would increase sufficiency, increase security and decrease inequality.

  • A crucial step towards achieving sufficiency and security is to ensure that those in work have strong hand in negotiating their terms and conditions. As industrial democracy has weakened so economic insecurity has increased. Every workplace above five people should have a legal right to trade union representation for staff. All wage settlements should be the result of collective bargaining by all staff through their trade union. As far as possible, sector-wide negotiations should take place across industry sectors – a building trades negotiation, a retail staff negotiation and so on. This then benefits people who are not in trade unions as well.

    But the long term strategic direction of a business matters to security and stability as well. All businesses above ten people should be legally required to reserve one third of the places on their management boards for staff, nominated through a staff association. This helps ensure businesses are anchored in their communities for the long term, giving employees the security they need.

  • When someone leaves their working life behind them as they get older, they become largely reliant on their pension. Since a Universal Basic Income is replacing most benefits, it will also replace the state pension. However, initially at least it is quite likely that a UBI would be at a level below the state pension. That should change in time, and the goal is to reach a UBI that creates a genuinely sustainable income for all. But until that is achieved, a Universal Basic Income should be supplemented with a Pension Supplement for pensioners.

  • The British pension system is notoriously bad at providing reliable income in old age. It is an inefficient way to deliver a private pension and enables far too much profiteering on the part of pension fund managers. It should be replaced by a National Pension Fund.


    That would be a single pension fund in the private sector through a member-owned mutual but open to all citizens and managed in the public good and not for profit. This can, initially, be created by developing a plan to draw together all the existing public sector pension funds. It can then begin to offer pension services to new entrants and those who want to move their existing pension pots, until hopefully it becomes normal practice for everyone to rely on their Universal Basic Income but to supplement it with contributions to a publicly-managed public-good pension fund delivering reliable retirement income.

  • There is no credible strategy for poverty in Scotland. It is a priority every politician claims is at the heart of why they got into politics, but the result is always more warm words than credible action. At the heart of a poverty strategy is to recognise that you shouldn't need one, that if your economy is working properly and if you have a proper safety net for those unable to participate in the formal economy, a nation like Scotland should have no poverty. But since we don't have those things we need to mitigate the problems we have.

    This is too complicated to put in one short summary piece, but the elements of a poverty strategy can be found all over Common Weal's big ideas. Beating structural poverty isn't a single set of actions, it is a mind set you need to apply to all public decisions. Until we start taking fighting poverty seriously we will keep losing.

The Solution

Reduce inequality

Inequality reduces the quality of life for everyone, no matter where on the income spectrum they are. It has been shown again and again that physical health and mental wellbeing, social cohesion, effective democracy, rates of crime, community cohesion, positive social behaviours, tax take and the ability to deliver social services and much else is affected negatively by inequality. Even those who do well financially from the inequality have to live with higher crime, poorer public services, declining infrastructure, fragmenting communities, failing democracy and all the other problems inequality brings. If you can reduce inequality while maintaining people's broad quality of life, almost everything gets better for everyone.

The To Do List

  • The first thing we have to focus on in reducing inequality is not redistribution of wealth through tax (though progressive taxes are necessary, especially if linked to a Universal Basic Income which could transform inequality). Instead we need to focus on what is causing income to be distributed so unequally in the first place – the structure of the economy. There is more than enough wealth in the Scottish economy to ensure that everyone has a decent standard of living but we have created an economy in which high levels of pay inequality are baked in. Everything from the failure to have an incomes policy in Scotland to the disincentive to businesses to invest in modernisation because of an available pool of low-pay labour has created an economy addicted to low pay and poor working like zero hours contracts. We can see this in Britain's pitiful productivity rates – rather than trying to get more value from employees through high skills we accept low value from low pay staff.

    This is exacerbated because the British economy deindustrialised for largely political reasons and in so doing replaced high-quality, high-productivity, high-pay manufacturing jobs with low-quality, low-productivity, low-pay service sector jobs. This created a downward spiral in which more and more we built an economy round low-pay, low-skill work and so are left with an economy totally reliant on low-skill, low-pay labour. We have trapped ourselves and cannot get out of this trap by doing more of the same. Rather than growing this economy as is, we need to change the economy, to create something different.

    That needs a different approach – an approach known as an industrial strategy. An industrial strategy does not see 'any economy as good economy' but rather sets out the details of a kind of economy which really benefits the public good. It then focusses public support on interventions which change the economy for the better, using a wide range of tools to build that kind of economy. This rules out support for low pay corporate jobs and instead redirects it to support domestic businesses with the capacity to grow into productive manufacturing businesses. An industrial strategy also identifies where there are opportunities which are not being developed or new industry sectors emerging which need pump-primed to help them establish. It is to take an 'entrepreneurial state' approach to the economy with the goal of building the kind of economy that reduces inequality.

    Clearly there isn't enough space to cover this subject in detail here – lots more can be found in our Big Idea on Industry.

  • One of the major impacts of industrial democracy is to increase productivity and wages. When trade unions can negotiate a fair share of pay, pay increases as a proportion of profits (the opposite has been happening in recent years). But more than that; employees who have a long-term commitment to a business because they are properly represented on the Board drive investment in training, upskilling, new technology and innovation. Employee-directors actually increase the productivity of their employer, and that in turn reduces economic inequality.

  • Other than through the minimum wage, public policy in Britain remains entirely neutral on incomes. Politicians say they want higher wages but they do not back this up with policies other than claiming that economic growth creates higher salaries. Unfortunately it is the form of often exploitative economic growth we have had which has reduced wages and increased inequality. In fact government ministers very rarely tell you what they even mean by 'higher wages' – what would success look like? What would failure look like?

    To begin an incomes policy, we could instead ask what Scotland's citizens think is a fair pay for a fair days work. Through a series of Citizens' Assemblies it would be possible to create a public statement of what levels of pay the public thinks is fair – what is the least someone needs to live a decent life, what sort of pay gap should there be to a senior manager, should a teacher be paid less than a lawyer? By allowing the public to create a 'ready reckoner' of what is fair pay for fair work we would establish, for the first time, something that looks like a national statement of intent. It is not necessary to enforce adherence to that scale for it to have an impact. It would be a powerful statement in itself, would influence pay negotiations and would help us to understand how close we are to the public's aspiration for the economy.

    It would then be possible to assess economic development support according to how closely it was moving pay towards the public's aspiration. There is an assumption that pay is 'at the discretion of employers', but that has not resulted in positive outcomes for society as a whole. We should take a national approach to wages.

  • The sharp end of inequality is poverty, the point at which those at the bottom of the economic order no longer have sufficient income for a decent life, and almost certainly have no financial security at all. Politicians talk about ending poverty all the time but they do very about it and the poverty strategies we have had are not even close to sufficient to tackle the issue. The solution is to address the economic causes of poverty through a long-term industrial strategy, with a generous Universal Basic Income being introduced to create rapid change.

    In the short term we need to take steps to be able to address the outcomes of poverty where they occur. We need more community health support in the poorest communities where citizens are less likely to seek help. We need a much more effective locally based National Care Service organised through local hubs to help support people with the impacts of poverty. And we need community-level social hubs to provide a base for all kinds of activities which help people who are in poverty.

    But there is one factor in poverty which affects Britain in a way it doesn't affect comparable nations – the role of housing. The UK has inordinately expensive housing and the plight of people in poverty in Britain is much worse than that of those in comparable developed nations almost wholly because of the cost of housing. We need a rapidly rolled out strategy to reduce the cost of housing, particularly through the mass provision of high-quality public rental housing.

    Packaged together with a whole range of other approaches in the education service, support for addiction through the National Care Service, local, responsive policing to reduce levels of crime and much more, we could have a poverty strategy worth the name in Scotland.

The Solution

Make time

The only public good that contemporary politics believes comes from work is pay; time is not considered a human good in public policy. And yet spare time lies behind a wealthy of beneficial public-good outcomes. Stress and anxiety is often a response to having more to do than there is time to do it in, and stress has severe medical and psychological consequences. Relaxation is also key to human health and wellbeing – we cannot be 'on' all the time. Having more time lets us do things for ourselves that we currently outsource in unhealthy ways. For example, we buy junk food because we have no time to cook, doing ourselves both substantial physical harm and exporting our wealth. Having time to cook is good for us in multiple ways. But there is nothing which does more for our wellbeing than community, being with people we love. This may be our family, or friends, or it may be time in our community at clubs or hobbies or simply socialising. Humans are a social animal and isolation and loneliness are very bad for us.

Time also has shared benefits. A community that has more free time can achieve much higher levels of civic participation. This doesn't just improve the wellbeing of those who participate (though it does), it improves the community for everyone. From environmental improvement schemes that make communities more attractive to live in to the provision of activities people can get involved in with volunteers running sporting clubs or amateur dramatics or programmes of local concerts, communities in which residents have time to dedicate to that community are better communities.

We have talked about work-life balance for decades now, and before that we talked about the rat race. Overwork is a plague on society and an economy which requires overwork to provide a survivable salary is a failing economy. We need more time for ourselves and to spend with each other.

The To Do List

  • Above all, we work long hours not because we enjoy working long hours but because low pay or high housing costs mean we have to. It has been shown repeatedly that people who have economic sufficiency will choose to work fewer hours rather than seek more income. We have drifted into a long-hours, low-pay, low employment protections culture and we need to reverse it. We have an expectation written into policy of what is the minimum pay someone deserves for an hour's work but we have no real expectation of the maximum hours someone should have to work, or at least the enforcement of policy does not suggest we do. We have come to accept extra hours of work as a kind of 'compensation' for low pay and high costs. We have to reverse that.

    The key is economic sufficiency. The package which creates sufficiency also enables people to manage their working time better. So we need an incomes policy to guide what we believe to be sufficient pay backed with an industrial strategy to deliver such an economy, we need a Universal Basic Income to create a baseline ability to survive and we need much stronger employment protection laws which are much more strenuously enforced. We cannot tackle time poverty and overwork without tackling economic sufficiency and workers' rights.

    This is exacerbated because the British economy deindustrialised for largely political reasons and in so doing replaced high-quality, high-productivity, high-pay manufacturing jobs with low-quality, low-productivity, low-pay service sector jobs. This created a downward spiral in which more and more we built an economy round low-pay, low-skill work and so are left with an economy totally reliant on low-skill, low-pay labour. We have trapped ourselves and cannot get out of this trap by doing more of the same. Rather than growing this economy as is, we need to change the economy, to create something different.

    That needs a different approach – an approach known as an industrial strategy. An industrial strategy does not see 'any economy as good economy' but rather sets out the details of a kind of economy which really benefits the public good. It then focusses public support on interventions which change the economy for the better, using a wide range of tools to build that kind of economy. This rules out support for low pay corporate jobs and instead redirects it to support domestic businesses with the capacity to grow into productive manufacturing businesses. An industrial strategy also identifies where there are opportunities which are not being developed or new industry sectors emerging which need pump-primed to help them establish. It is to take an 'entrepreneurial state' approach to the economy with the goal of building the kind of economy that reduces inequality.

    Clearly there isn't enough space to cover this subject in detail here – lots more can be found in our Big Idea on Industry.

  • For decades if not centuries we have seen recurring periods where technological advances create productivity increases which hold out the hope that we could all work less and have more leisure time. It is pretty clear however that this is not what has happened. The problem is that it is not technology which decides whether its benefits are to be shared widely or narrowly but its owners and the nature of the economy. We have waited a long time for market forces to deliver the 'utopia of leisure' which some theories of capitalism claim will be the final outcome. We must realise that this is not the endpoint of unrestrained capitalism.

    If we want change we must enforce it and structure it. Our national goal should be to work towards a four-day working week for everyone, each continuing to earn the income they need for a good life. We cannot do that without economic transformation. If the economy supplies the possibility of a low-pay workforce then employers will shape their business strategies to take advantage of low pay. This means deskilling jobs and accepting a drop in productivity in return for a lower wage bill, but this is not the only option. In other countries with higher-pay economies employers take a different approach. If employers have to pay higher wages anyway they will seek to gain advantage from them by making them higher-skill jobs which are more productive. For example, rather than centralised stock management with staff in shops doing little more than stacking shelves, some economies have decentralised management with individual shop-based staff managing the whole business of the shop. This takes advantage of the higher skills of higher-paid employees to gain advantage from the increased productivity.

    The opportunities for this are about to grow rapidly with the arrival of more automation and greater use of Artificial Intelligence. To achieve a policy of a four-day week for all we need to pursue a national strategy of economic transformation to get there. That means we must signpost clearly the steps it will take to get there to let employers understand that there will be an escalator on minimum wage and a target date for a switch to a four-day week. We must then actively work with employers to advise, support and implement the changes in business practice which will enable them to thrive in a four-day economy. This will be more difficult in some economic sectors than others, and it won't be achievable overnight. But it must be a serious commitment to achieve change with binding milestones along the way.

  • Some bosses fetishise the sight of a lot of workers in an office, 'subjugated' and under their direct control. However, what bosses fetishise and what is necessary for someone to be able to complete a job are not the same thing, and bosses cannot specify job requirements just because they want to. We should have a national right to work from home in any case other than those where it can be shown that this is impossible or genuinely impractical. Removing the time spent commuting and enabling people to be present in their home when their children come home or for deliveries or tradespeople increases their personal and family time and this must be prioritised over old-fashioned ideas of what office work should look like.

    There are three issues which need to be addressed. The first is that we must codify what the reasonable expectations of home working are. It cannot be acceptable to allow this practice to infringe on personal time, for example by expecting people to check email outside working hours. These must become legal protections. The second is that we must take seriously the risks of social isolation. To address that we need a serious strategy for place, for restoring real local communities which mitigate against loneliness and isolation. The third is that we must recognise that many jobs simply aren't suitable for home working, like care and retail – and these are often the lowest paid jobs. We must start to think what parity would look like in these cases. For example, perhaps a maximum hours law could subtract a set 'commute time' for those who cannot home work, meaning they have to work fewer hours of formal employment. All of these practices are developing as we go along and we must monitor and learn what is working and what is not.

  • There is no time more important than the time a parent spends with a newborn child. This is time which is essential to the development of the child and the relationship with the parents. Our goal should be a generous parental leave programme. The target should be for new parents to have the right to 60 weeks of leave which can be shared between them but with ten weeks reserved for each parent. These first ten weeks would be at full pay with the next 20 weeks being paid at 80 per cent of pay. That takes parents to six months, but they should then have the right to take another six months at the level of an Enhanced Basic Income (like the pension).

  • We arrange retirement as a 'hard crash', full time one day, not working the next. Now we are trying to push people to work later and later in life as we raise the retirement age. But older people may not want to give up productive employment completely while not feeling that they want to continue at the same pace they were before. This is why a phased retirement policy offers an alternative. If someone was working a full-time, four-day week, perhaps they might first reduce their work to three days a week, then two, potentially even then just one. We could phase the pension up over the same period to ensure ongoing economic sufficiency. In this way we can maximise people's ability to contribute to the economy in a way that does not force them to work long hours well into their old age.

The Solution

Prevent harm

A significant aspect of our wellbeing is how much harm our society does to it. We are living through a crisis in mental health and one in which obesity and many related diseases are also rising fast. These and many other external factors harm our wellbeing. We have to find ways to give people a better chance of maintaining baseline wellbeing by protecting them from these harms and helping them to avoid these harms.

The harms come in many ways. Poverty or even the continual stress of financial duress for the middle classes creates significant psychological pressures on people. Advertising and hyper-consumerism make people feel that unless they are consuming more and more, they are being left behind and are 'failing' in their lives. Our food system is dominated by Ultra Processed Foods which are so harmful for our health and our minds and emotions that they are driving a collapse in our health service and our general state of wellbeing. A changing climate is placing greater and greater strains on our lives and are forcing us to adapt to new, uncertain and troubling times. Our community cohesion is declining and loneliness and isolation have devastating effects on us. Social media actively encourages us to feel bad about ourselves by constantly comparing our lives to those of others we will never be able to emulated and creates an easy forum for bullying and hatred. Overwork burns us out and cuts off the avenues of relaxation and socialising which help us to recover. These aspects of our society must be addressed and regulated to reduce the harms, and people must be given better support with the harms they have already done.

The To Do List

  • We have the well-known practice of taking a 'public health' approach to the health of the nation. So similarly we should have a 'public care' approach to our mental health and wellbeing. This would try to identify the causes of our mental health and care crisis and would try to tackle them through regulation, support, advice and the public financing of alternatives. There are far too many potential aspects of a full public care approach to be considered here, but some examples would be in social media, food, advertising and work.

    We need a full food strategy to wean the nation off Ultra Processed foods and on to healthier, tastier alternatives. A health externalities tax that would tax unhealthy food for the cost it creates in the NHS and wider society would make healthier food more competitive. Stronger nutrition standards should be introduced.

    Advertising is harmful to our wellbeing. It encourages us to consume beyond our means and makes us feel bad if we do not match up to the unachievable image it presents us. It should be regulated much more and in particular it ought to be something people can choose to avoid, meaning that the blanket proliferation of 'advertising pollution' in our physical spaces must be rolled back.

    To create a genuinely wellbeing-promoting economy we need a proper poverty strategy, a proper system of industrial democracy, much stronger workers' rights, a four day working week, the right to work from home and better pay.

    There is an assumption that algorithmically-driven social media environment is the only remaining option for communicating between each other. It isn't. We need to take a strong child protection approach to all social media use and ban those under 14 or 16 from using any form of algorithm-driven social media. Ideally we should think of an algorithm as an 'editor' deciding content and absolutely not a neutral process. We should therefore accept that social media is 'edited' and 'published' in exactly the same way as any other publication such as a newspaper. Algorithms have the purpose of identifying what content is most likely to get us addicted (which they pitch as being 'what you really want'), yet many of the contexts in which we use social media simply do not need algorithmic moderation. Before social media we had 'forums' and 'bulletin boards'. For many of our community uses of social media a public platform without algorithms would enable communities or societies or subject-based groups of all sorts to share and communicate without an algorithm forcing extreme content to them.

    These are only examples; we have too much of an assumption that commerce can do as it pleases with us and then it is for the taxpayer to pay for the mess. This is wrong. We need to have a coherent, consistent strategy for preventing the harm in the first place.

  • Care need is skyrocketing. Care is fundamental to human existence. Every one of us relies on care, and every one of us now relies on care which is not delivered purely within the family or community. From childbirth to support with demential, formal care services will be part of the life of all of us.

    Yet care remain a second-tier service which is fragmented, poorly funded, highly bureaucratic and target-and-management led. It is failing the people it should be supporting. We now need a National Care Service on a par with the National Health Service. This should be a nationally funded and guaranteed service delivered locally and led by care professionals. All existing care services should be brought under its umbrella, including some that are not currently within the care portfolio. This means pre-natal support for prospective parents, early years childcare support for new parents, social work, adoption and fostering, child and teenage mental health, addiction support, debt advice, consumer protection advice and other aspects of citizens' advice, support with recovery from hospital. With infirmity and disability, with domestic abuse, with poverty, housing and homelessness, psychological services for adults, demential and old age care and much more. If you need help which isn't immediately medical, there should be one place to go.

    All of this should be accessed first through Care Hubs. Think of these as direct equivalents of a GP surgery or health centre, places you can drop in or make an appointment with someone who will help guide and signpost you through the services you need. It can colocate with citizens advice services and more to create an integrated service.

    It must be professionally driven. The current model of untrained managers directing and controlling highly-trained care professionals is entirely counterproductive and wastes resources and time. Care Hubs must be funded like a GP's practice and, just as a GP is able to lead and shape the service of the local clinic, it should be for social workers and other care specialists to do the same for care.

    This service must be free at the point of delivery, run in the public sector and should never be profit-making. This is particularly important with residential care services which are largely in the private sector where they are often as much about property speculation as they are about providing care. All care homes should gradually be brought into the public domain, or alternatively existing private provision should be replaced with higher-quality publicly-owned facilities.

    The reason all of this is important is that care is a practice which, crucially, is built on trust and relationships. The fragmented service we have means that it is difficult if not impossible for care professionals to develop relationships – and yet without trust it is much harder to deliver care. Care workers must have time to care and those being cared for must have consistency and reliability.

    None of this on its own tackles the fundamental problem that we do not invest enough in care for the volume of care need our society is creating. If a 'public care' approach is taken over time then the demand for care will recede. Until it does, we need to invest more. All of the above helps us to get the very most from the resources we currently fund, but that does not mean it is enough to meet the nation's care needs.

  • The sole purpose of corporations is to return profit to shareholders. It has no duty to customers and wider society other than what governments enforce through regulation. This is supposed to be balanced only through the 'power of the consumer', and thus it becomes assumed that the only counter to corporate power is personal responsibility, a concept heavily promoted by the corporations themselves. But there is a massive power imbalance between corporations and individuals and any concept of consumer responsibility relies on the consumer having full information and viable alternative options. That is very often not the case.

    There are a world of ways to protect people from the abuse of corporate power. An 'externalities tax' that builds the cost of the harm of products into their price so that consumers genuinely know the 'cost' of what they're buying is a crucial first step. Another is to ensure prominent labelling on products that makes clear to the consumer the implications of what they are buying if it is likely to cause harm, in exactly the same way we do with cigarettes. But we need much better product regulation and many more powers for the citizen to challenge and face down corporations. A full corporate protection bill should be introduced to rebalance the power imbalance between individuals and corporations to help reduce the harm that poorly-regulated corporation behaviours do.

  • Offering advice to people on how to live their lives can be patronising and intrusive, yet not doing so leaves them uninformed about the kinds of choices they themselves may want to make. People do not choose to be unhealthy, or to get into debt, or to develop addictions, or to become stress and anxious, or to damage the environment. More often than not, given the realistic choice and the information needed, people will make the right choices – or at least be a lot more likely to do so.

    The public realm is often hesitant to provide advice which conflicts with the interests of the interests represented by the most powerful lobbying voices and we know again and again that corporations will go to great lengths to hide, deny and distract from information that shows their own activities are doing harm and costing the public purse significant sums – think of the tobacco industry, and the oil and gas industry, and the Ultra Processed Food industries. All have a track record of dishonesty. But it is a wider problem than that with, for example, heavy lobbying by industry to create conditions where it is down to consumer choice to avoid unhealthy products but with a refusal to put proper information on products to enable consumers to understand their choices in clear and comprehensible ways.

    One of the most important messages we could be sending out to promote wellbeing is that shopping does not make you happy but quite the opposite. The rise of low levels of wellbeing, high levels of debt and rapidly deteriorating environments match the rise of consumerism. Yet there is never a message that says 'shop less, be happier', because our economic strategy is to promote more and more spending at any cost in the pursuit of illusory GDP growth. From school and throughout life the public must have easy, continual access to the best information, informed by science, on what is most likely to improve their wellbeing.

The Solution

Strengthen community

It may not always seem like it but we find our wellbeing mostly in the company of others. Wildness, green space, wildlife and pets, the arts and loads more promote our wellbeing, but few things are as corrosive to our wellbeing than loneliness and isolation. The more time we have spent alone with only screens for company, the worse our mental health has become. Humans are a social animal and we thrive through positive social relationships. Community cohesion has been under great pressure for a long time with out-of-town shopping and the decline of high streets being very visible signs of the loss of the social institutions and shared community spaces where we used to meet each other. Seemingly never-ending cuts to local amenities by local authorities greatly add to the problem.

This risks becoming worse. With home delivery, home working, weak community and an always-on attention economy, it becomes increasingly possible to exist without seeing anyone at all. This would be a disaster for our society and the early signs of this disaster are everywhere. Working from home should, on the whole, be a positive development, but in part because communities had already been declining as the economy centralised, many people had their primary social interactions at work. If we do not replace those relationships with others, home working can have very negative effects on our wellbeing.

This issue has a whole range of age-specific features. For example, increasingly boys and young men are giving up on the kinds of communal activities that defined youth like playing football with friends or joining clubs or societies like the Boy Scouts or local sports clubs. Instead they are staying at home and playing computer games in their room. People of working age in low-income work often have to work so many hours to make ends meet that there is little remaining time for socialising and even less energy to do so. This can be particularly problematic with anti-social working hours. And as people live to be older and older but social institutions decline, people can easily lose their social networks or be too infirm to access them, particularly as public infrastructure and public transport declines and more and more housing is built only to be accessed by cars.

There are two kinds of community that are fundamental to human existence; the family and the immediate local community. These are forever in a way that other communities (such as work) come and go. We need to enable more time with family by controlling work-life balance, and we need stronger local communities. This will not happen by itself; there has to be a strategy to reinvigorate communities and turn them back from dormitories to the source of rich and varied social life.

The To Do List

  • No community without community power. Scotland is one of the most centralised countries in the developed world – in fact, it is quite likely it is the most centralised of all. All of the kinds of wellbeing challenges we have looked at can be addressed in some way at the local level, but not if there is no power at the local level. Scotland has no power at the local level. What we call 'local authorities' are in reality regional authorities – we have no local democracy which would be recognisable as 'local' in a normal European country. We are not out of proportion to our closest comparators by a factor of two or three but by factors of 20 or 30. It means that communities themselves have no power, no budget and no voice.

    If we are going to rebuild greater wellbeing from the community up, it must start with giving communities real power. Waiting for a regional authority which may be many miles away and hoping it might do some of the things that we, locally, hope will be done has failed us. Communities must be free to innovate for themselves, finding new and creative ways to improve relationships and connectivity right across that community. To achieve this we should introduce Development Councils, local councils at the town or village level which are focussed on on 'running every day services' but on developing and improving the community as a whole based on local priorities and local circumstances. This lets communities drive themselves forward and provides a focus for those communities to come together and think about their future.

  • We shouldn't need Community Hubs, but we do. The acute needs that many of the poorest communities face cannot be met by parachuting in emergency services from afar. The social dislocation and collapse in local infrastructure means that many neighbourhoods have no real infrastructure at all – nowhere to access local services, no shops, no social spaces and no focal point. We need action not on communities but in communities. The best way to do this is to create community hubs by identifying a building in every neighbourhood that can become a central point, a community hub for bringing people together. These could be old town halls, or disused retail spaces, or old factories or churches. It doesn't matter; what matters is what is done in them. This will vary from community to community. In some the crucial issue might be to provide 'warm banks' or food banks or other forms of urgent support. In some communities the focus might be more on providing social activities to reduce loneliness. In all cases these can become important bases for public services as well, a place for community health workers or social workers or citizens advice services to work out of.

    We can address the issues in many communities because there is simply no capacity in those communities capable of addressing anything. In the longer term we can create a vision for how these very local community hubs (no-one should have to walk more than five minutes) can become the heart of the five-minute neighbourhood. But first, we simply need these infrastructure resources to be there to provide a base for action and a chance to solve problems together.

  • Not all businesses are the same. Corporations are explicitly 'sociopathic' in their constitutions, driven only ever to maximise profit irrespective of the wider costs or harms done. There are other kinds of business though. Social enterprises are specifically orientated to create public good outcomes, mutual companies and cooperatives are 100 per cent focussed on the interests of their customers or partners, B Corps are large corporations which are constituted to have a broader range of goals than just profit maximisation. Even normal private businesses operate differently when strong stakeholder representation on their boards are mandated, such as employees or local communities. And generally smaller businesses tend to be more rooted in and therefore much more responsive to the interests of their communities.

    Business isn't business isn't business. There are many forms of business which are more positive contributors to their community than sociopathic corporations. Public support, regulation and economic governance should do much more to encourage businesses that contribute and cow-tow much less to those which don't.

  • The key to making community work is to make the infrastructure of communities work. If you have to leave your community for virtually any purpose other than sleeping (such as shopping or taking exercise or accessing public services or socialising) then there remains little inside that community to hold it together. It is 'accidental interactions' which build community – saying hello to someone in the shop, chatting to someone walking a dog in a local park, meeting new people in a local gym and so on. We must 'engineer in' these social interactions and create reasons for people to meet and spend time together if we want to reverse the decline of community.

    There are lots and lots of ways to do that, but they are now bundled together in the idea of a '15 minute city' where anything you need can be sourced within 15 minutes of your house. And yet this is a dreadfully unambitious target if you're serious, particularly if you're including car travel. We need five-minute communities where you can walk to and linger in places locally that both serve your needs and create opportunities for sociability. The many elements of this are discussed throughout Common Weal's extensive work on localism.

The Solution

Enshrine human rights

You can't improve someone's wellbeing with human rights, but if you don't gave human rights in place and – crucially – if you don't enforce them it can most certainly have very negative effects on wellbeing. Rights are safeguards to ensure that people have a minimum level of protection in their lives and making sure that people are indeed protected is crucial. It can be easy to promise human rights as if they solve problems. They don't; they only empower people to demand that their problems are solved whenever their fundamental rights are being ignored. But those protections are key to many people's wellbeing and should be strengthened.

The To Do List

  • We currently have a range of rights enshrined in different pieces of legislation in different places, and there are gaps in the range of rights. This is in part because various campaigners working in various subject issues see rights as a powerful political tool for them to be able to put pressure on government – whether it is right to housing, or a right to food, or a right to time off from caring responsibilities. What we need is a single, consistent Bill of Rights which codifies these properly in a single place and seeks to make them consistent and comprehensive. It should also make clear how citizens can ensure their rights are met – with rights go responsibilities (someone must be accountable for failures) and resources (everyone involved must have the ability to actually make sure rights are met).

  • One way to make sure there is a better chance that rights will be met is by providing a right to legal aid in pursuit of those rights. If a public or private authority has breached your rights then you need the chance of challenging that authority. Rights are a legal guarantee and therefore the main way for you to seek to ensure they are achieved is through legal action. But that isn't something you can do yourself and it is an expensive business – a problem particularly because those whose rights are contravened are often those in the weakest financial position. If it was possible to gain legal aid to pursue claims against breaches of human rights the authorities would be more likely to think twice about contravening those rights in the first place, and there would be a much better chance of the problem being rectified quickly and fairly,

The Solution

Different forms of ownership

Happy people don't shop more than they have to. Happy people spend time doing things they actually value. To make someone shop for things they don't need you need to make them feel insecure, or that they are being left behind, or you need to persuade them they can achieve an unattainable lifestyle simply by buying a product. The goal is simply to monopolise people's attention, undermine their self confidence and then persuade them they can get it back through consumption to separate them from as much of their own money as possible. All this does is create the short-term 'sugar rush' of endorphins; it produces no long-term wellbeing but does leave the anxiety and often the financial duress.

We don't need to live like this, and one of the solutions is to give people options to gain access to what advertising and retail promises but without being stuck in a cycle of constant shopping. Unless we can deconsumerise and spend more of our time with each other and less online shopping, it is unlikely out wellbeing will improve substantially.

The To Do List

  • There is no need to shop simply to gain access to the lifestyle that shopping promises. The model is the library; most of us only read a book once so it makes perfect sense to borrow it rather than buy it. We get exactly the same experience but with less cost, commitment, waste and storage bloat in our homes. From there, many of us use tools that we have no real need to possess (famously, the average screw gun only operates on average for 15 minutes in its entire lifespan), hence the creation of tool libraries. We can borrow a screw gun for an evening, give it back and then borrow a floor sander if we need that later.

    We can expand this concept well beyond tools and books. Want to try out a musical instrument, or a new sport, or give computer gaming a shot, or have a go at dressmaking, or finally get your back lawn in order? The cost of entry for all these can be high – a new cello or set of golf clubs or console or sewing machine or lawnmower. If you don't take to the new activity, the money is wasted. These are all ideal options for leasing. If we created a National Lease Agency to make all of these things easily and immediately available to us to let us try new experiences. If we're shopping we're not doing things that genuinely enrich our lives and if we're not shopping we have less reason to be in finan

  • The compulsion to spend and the manipulation of people's expectations to make them spend more has negative effects on household finances and the environment - but it also has significant impacts on people's wellbeing beyond their financial situation. As well as the fact that consumption is driven by advertising which is designed to play on our insecurities and to generate unrealistic expectations, if we spend time and money on consumption, we are not spending it on other things. Consumption gives the short-term illusion of wellbeing but our wellbeing relies on so much more, like socialisation, being active, feeling like you contribute, having a purpose in life, being part of a community and so much more. Consumption has been like a drug fuelling politics for the last 50 years and the more we have consumed, the more isolated we have become and the worse our mental health has become. No politician has ever challenged the idea that enabling people to consume more is the ultimate purpose of politics. This is a gross distortion of reality. It is time we committed to a proper deconsumerisation strategy and started to promote other ways to spend our time and money which do much more to make us feel good. That is what is at the heart of long-term wellbeing and it is time politicians championed wellbeing over profits.

The Solution

Help people find purpose

You can't improve someone's wellbeing with human rights, but if you don't gave human rights in place and – crucially – if you don't enforce them it can most certainly have very negative effects on wellbeing. Rights are safeguards to ensure that people have a minimum level of protection in their lives and making sure that people are indeed protected is crucial. It can be easy to promise human rights as if they solve problems. They don't; they only empower people to demand that their problems are solved whenever their fundamental rights are being ignored. But those protections are key to many people's wellbeing and should be strengthened.

The To Do List

  • We have an an entire 'big idea' which is about recreation and you can find a lot more detail there. It is about encouraging three things – participation in the arts and sports, getting engaged in local community activities, and having more and better ways for relaxing and socialising. We propose local community hubs equipped to run a wide series of creative and enjoyable activities, from talks and arts classes to car mechanics and music-making and local history or book groups. It would be a place to learn a language or get tickets to a show. It would be as normal to pop out an hear a talk from a chef about how to improve their cooking or join a pottery class as it would to head out and browse a clothes shop. We must remove the barriers to people who want to do interesting things and help them find their purpose by getting involved.

    We also propose an app which is specially designed to make people recognise the vast an amazing resources we have in our country to do things other than shop – places to visit, hillside walks to inspire, events to join in with, tickets to buy.

  • There is a lot more to finding a purpose in life than either just entertainment or learning, great as those are. Sometimes people want to feel like they're contributing to or participating in something they value, like their community. It can be as simple as volunteering for a local sports club or as big as starting a local social enterprise or joining an allotment association or training to be a sporting coach or whatever it is that matches your skills and knowledge with causes local and beyond that you value, want to support and want to make a difference to. This is what makes people feel their life is worth it.

  • Few things can give you a strong a sense of meaning and purpose as raising a family – but it isn't always easy. We need more policies which are child-friendly and support parents throughout what is one of the biggest challenges they will ever face. This means a proper, wrap-around childcare system with public support which can be extended to working ours care. It means the kind of small-group early years childcare support that means people can go back to work. It means committing to let people agree child-friendly working practices, including working from home, working school hour contracts, providing support for working parents throughout summer holidays. It means ensuring a stable, survivable income and the work-life balance to spend time with families. It means having great care services, good advice support, excellent schools and education, a fast and responsive NHS and the psychological help which is there for those who want it.