Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department uses Office for National Statistics estimates of personal well-being in formulating policy; and what policies his Department has introduced to improve personal well-being in the last 12 months.

In developing policy, the Department draws on a range of analytical sources, as well as published and unpublished evidence. The Government is committed to improving the health of the population through all its policies. The Green Paper ‘Advancing Our Health: prevention in the 2020s’, published in July 2019, announced that the Government will develop a new composite health index to provide an indicator of health that can be tracked alongside gross domestic product. The index will measure changes in health over time and, along with other indicators, will be able to be used to assess the health impact of wider Government policies.