Some of the places I’ve passed through along the Pennine Way are abundant in WELLBYs.

Where I am now on my ‘journey about home’, for example, Eden – a district of Cumbria – boasts a whopping 654 of them. Edinburgh, where I set off on foot more than two weeks ago, has just 602 WELLBYs. Whilst Croydon, my final destination on this walk and where I grew up, is in between with 618. Some places have a lot less WELLBYs.

What’s a WELLBY and what are they good for?

WELLBYs stands for Wellbeing-Adjusted Life Years, and it is a simple metric for understanding wellbeing. The idea is that people want to live long and happy lives, where 1 WELLBY represents a unit of life satisfaction on a 0 to 10 scale for a period of one year.

Eden gets its score because average life satisfaction there is 7.8 out of 10 and life expectancy is 83.9 years. Simply multiplying the two scores gives 648 – the expected number of wellbeing-adjusted life years a person living there is expected to have. Eden is by no means the highest in the UK. Last year, BiGGAR Economics published a report showing the WELLBY distribution across the UK. There is a wide distribution in the UK from 553 in the City of Glasgow to 681 in the Orkney Islands. This is quite a gap.

What do these differences really show us

The first thing that these differences highlight for me is the inadequacy of our individualistically orientated conversations about wellbeing – that obtaining greater wellbeing is simply a matter of making better individual choices. Choice does matter, and there are likely to be some poor choices behind a lot of these numbers.

However, there is a deeper question that needs to be asked – why do large swathes of the population living in the same place have consistently lower wellbeing? Might it be something about those places that make it difficult to live long and happy lives. It could be a lack of access to nature and a lack of opportunity, for example, but it is also likely that choices are either limited or that have been engineered.

In my last blog post on this journey about home, I suggested that although it may seem like we have choice, the environment within which we make our choices are often designed to elicit outcomes. Much more than we realise, and it can result in us making decisions that are not in our interests of our own wellbeing. I think this is far worse in some places than others.

In my own life, I began to understand the presence of this choice manipulation by noticing the contrast in different spaces I frequented, how I felt, and pondering over the incentives behind those spaces. The commercial space is contrived to have us spend regardless of the wellbeing consequences, whereas natural spaces don’t have an agenda. They are not designed in underhand ways.

It is no accident that where the stunningly beautiful places that the Pennine Way passes through generally score high on the WELLBY metric. It’s generally well known that access to nature contributes to higher wellbeing. I would suggest that whilst nature is beneficial, a good part of that stems from the absence of manipulation, meaning we can relax and be ourselves.

What these WELLBY differences highlight is the role of a person’s surroundings and the context that drives their choices. This mirrors what I am attempting to draw attention to on my walk to Croydon, that individual choice only goes so far when it comes to living better lives. Our wellbeing is limited by what’s around us, which often we have very little control over. I imagine I’ll be passing through some more difficult parts of the country, where WELLBYs aren’t easy to come by, cities in particular, where not only is nature not present, but inequality can be high and opportunities low.

What we can do

We have to acknowledge that the context in which we make choices matters, rather than put blame on people for poor choice and low wellbeing. It would also help to have serious national discussion around why these differences occur and focus on the place not the people. We need to design our spaces with wellbeing in mind and we need to curtail the ease at which manipulation takes place. It’s too readily accepted in our societies.

Failing that WELLBYs are becoming a meaningful tool to evaluate decisions of businesses and policy. We’ve been using them in our work to help organisations articulate their benefits to society. The government recommends the use of WELLBYs to evaluate policies when there are hard to quantify benefits.

The great thing about thinking about decisions with respect to WELLBYs is that we’re more likely to get bigger gains by focusing on those with lower wellbeing. That is, we can more efficiently increase someone from a life satisfaction level of 4 to 5 than we can someone from a 9 to a 10. Likewise, for life expectancy, there are few gains to be had at the upper end.

And so, it’s those low WELLBY areas that need our attention. In the high WELLBY areas we should all try to visit regularly, draw some inspiration, and find time to relax and be.

***Thanks for reading my article. It is part of a journey about home, in which I’m walking from Edinburgh to Croydon. If you’d like to find out more then go here.