Jon Franklin

LGBTQ+ young people are a group that disproportionately live with lower wellbeing. We now have great new evidence that the right support can make a difference for them.

Many thanks to Karol Rodriguez-Cabrera as well as @neilhumphrey.bsky.social and his team at @beewelluk.bsky.social

27.08.2025 09:27 — 👍 6    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

Great new evidence from Rachel Gomez on the longterm impacts of children’s mental health.

For the geeks among us…it goes beyond looking at correlations and shows that improvements in mental health as a child lead to better outcomes, even after controlling for a host of other factors.

19.08.2025 21:52 — 👍 5    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0

Last week's better-than-expected GDP data is, of course, promising. But people's actual quality of life won't recover until we've addressed the long-term deterioration in these key drivers of wellbeing.

18.08.2025 14:54 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Caught in a trap? Low wellbeing in the UK 2025 | PBE 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 futu...

PBE's previous research highlights that deteriorating trends in physical health, mental health and loneliness are likely to be the main drivers of this deterioration.

pbe.co.uk/publications...

18.08.2025 14:50 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Line chart showing the proportion of UK adults with low life satisfaction. Declines from around 7% in 2011 to around 4.5% in 2019, before spiking to above 6% during the pandemic. It has since recovered but remains at an elevated level of 5% in 2025 Q1.

Most worryingly, around 2.7 million adults continue to live in wellbeing poverty (scoring 0-4 on the Life Satisfaction scale). This remains around 290,000 higher than it was in 2019.

18.08.2025 14:49 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Line chart showing average life satisfaction in the UK. Increases from 7.4 in 2011 to 7.7 in 2019, before declining rapidly to 7.3 during the pandemic. It then partially recovers in 2021 but has remained between 7.4 and 7.6 since that time.

UK is still recovering from the "wellbeing recession". Latest data from the ONS shows that average Life Satisfaction in the first quarter of 2025 remained 1.3% down on pre-pandemic levels.

18.08.2025 14:47 — 👍 1    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

I suspect this uncertainty for lower income households will come through in next Mondays personal wellbeing data release. The proportion of people living with a low overall quality of life - “wellbeing poverty” - likely to remain well above pre-pandemic levels.

15.08.2025 06:13 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Why Labour should target happiness alongside economic growth | Heather Stewart With the UK still shaking off the psychological side-effects of Covid, Rachel Reeves might want to broaden her aims

Great to see @guardianheather.bsky.social make the case for better measures of social progress, pointing to research by our friends @pbe.co.uk www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

15.07.2025 15:11 — 👍 6    🔁 2    💬 1    📌 0

Why Labour should target happiness alongside economic growth | Heather Stewart With the UK still shaking off the psychological side-effects of Covid, Rachel Reeves might want to broaden her aims

Great article from @guardianheather.bsky.social - "a more direct focus on making the UK a happier place might help to improve decision-making"

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

14.07.2025 08:42 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 2    📌 0

Why has the nation’s wellbeing not bounced back following the pandemic?

Deteriorations in our physical health, mental health and loneliness explain much of the increase in ‘wellbeing poverty’.

We won’t see a recovery in the nation’s wellbeing outlook until we see improvements in these key drivers.

02.07.2025 10:10 — 👍 1    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

Great piece from @sarahdavidson.bsky.social.

Highlights that “overall, our governments have yet to convince us that they are using the available wellbeing data”

There’s more that can be done to tackle key drivers of low wellbeing as discussed in our new report coming out next week!

24.06.2025 20:14 — 👍 4    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0