Life in the UK

Carnegie UK promotes putting wellbeing at the centre of policymaking across the UK. We believe we need a new, holistic measure of social progress to tell us whether policies and actions are positively influencing how well we are living.

Our Life in the UK index is a three-year demonstrator project designed to measure the collective wellbeing of the people of the UK, looking at social, economic, environmental, and democratic aspects of life. It also presents key findings in relation to how different demographics are doing across the UK.

We launched the first set of findings in November 2023 in partnership with Ipsos, based on a survey of more than 6900 people.

Key findings include:

Older people in the UK report a higher quality of life then their younger counterparts.
There is a widespread lack of trust across all age groups in the UK’s political systems and institutions, with only a minority of people feeling that they had influence over local or national decision-making.