Economics viewpoint Why happiness should be a Labour policy aim

Every parent who battled their way through home schooling during the long months of lockdown, and every vulnerable person forced to shield themselves away, can have had little doubt that the Covid pandemic was an unhappy time.

- Heather Stewart

But research by the non-profit consultancy Pro Bono Economics (PBE) suggests that the nation's wellbeing has never fully recovered from the plunge it took in mid-2020.

Happiness - or wellbeing, or life satisfaction - seems a slippery concept to measure, but economists have been studying and tracking how the public are feeling about their lives for decades. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics has done this since 2011 by asking four questions, including: "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?" and "Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?" As the first lockdown took hold, the anxiety measure spiked, not surprisingly, while the other three, which track respondents' satisfaction, happiness and sense of purpose, all had marked declines.

Given the shadow the pandemic cast over so many people's lives, it feels intuitively right that on none of these four metrics has wellbeing returned to the pre-Covid level.