Friday 15 February 2019
The Better Life Indicators Report, published for the first time today, presents indicators selected to monitor progress against the States' vision for Future Guernsey, as presented in the Policy & Resource Plan.
The indicators were agreed by the States in June 2017 and were selected from the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation's (OECD) Regional Wellbeing Index which is part of its Better Life Initiative. The initiative is designed to enable a comparison between nations and regions using measures the OECD deem to be generally representative of wellbeing in a range of areas.
The intention of using this Framework as a basis for reporting is to enable Guernsey to be compared with other jurisdictions as well as to track changes over time. In this edition, if the best performing jurisdiction is scored 10 and the worst 0 and other jurisdictions scored based on their relative position in between, Guernsey scores as follows for each of the key themes of the Policy and Resource Plan:
- 9.4 for Our Economy
- 7.0 for Our Quality of Life
- 7.4 for Our Place in the World
- Surveys to collect data for Our Community are underway and data on these indicators will be presented in the next version of the report
Gavin St Pier, President of the Policy & Resources Committee said;
"I welcome the publication of this report. It is the first step to place our performance on these very high-level indicators in context by comparing with other jurisdictions. Generally speaking, our relative performance on these indicators is 'good' or 'very good'.
"However, even where our performance is exemplary, these indicators suggest areas where we might need to look closer at what is going on in Guernsey. For example, despite the widespread experience that housing in Guernsey is expensive, the average percentage of a household's income spent on housing is actually quite low compared to other jurisdictions. We need to understand this better. This is thought to be because of the high proportion of people who own their own homes, particularly among older households where they are likely to do so without a mortgage. It is likely that different sections of our community will have very different experiences of housing costs and is something we may now need to investigate further."
The Report is designed to provide monitoring of high-level strategic performance in a way that is comparable with other jurisdictions and to signpost readers to further, more detailed, information. More data on Guernsey's economy and socio-economic conditions, including publications on poverty, household income, inflation, population and employment and house prices are available at www.gov.gg/data.
