Friday 20 December 2019
The States of Guernsey have today published their second edition of the Guernsey Annual Better Life Indicators Report which is used to monitor progress against the Future Guernsey Plan.
The Report shows Guernsey is performing well compared with other jurisdictions in a wide range of areas which reflect our quality of life.
This report contains an adapted version of the Regional Wellbeing Framework from the OECD Better Life initiative. Where comparisons are possible it also contains comparisons with outcomes in other OECD countries.
The range of indicators has been expanded in this year's publication to capture new measures under the heading of "our community" using data collected by the 2018 Wellbeing Survey (available here https://www.gov.gg/wellbeingsurveys). These show, for example, that 85% of Guernsey's population has at least a secondary level of education and 76% of the population report that they have good or very good health.
Overall, these indicators show Guernsey performs very well in many important areas: long-term unemployment is extremely low, and measures such as life expectancy (benchmarked as at 2016 with latest OECD available data) and disposable household income are among the highest of any jurisdiction.
Deputy Gavin St Pier, President of the Policy & Resources Committee said:
"We're getting better at measuring and understanding the trends in Islanders' wellbeing. The ability to monitor our progress against the Future Guernsey Plan is key to achieving meaningful progress.
"We should also welcome what the indicators themselves tell us about the quality of life in our Bailiwick. We have excellent job opportunities and good income levels for most islanders and our community is extremely safe. These are the things our government works to maintain. But we must not be complacent.'
"These indicators suggest that Guernsey offers, for most people, a good quality of life. But we must also remember that this is not necessarily the case for everyone and that there are people both above and below the averages presented. Through the ongoing work by the States to improve living standards, we hope to bring focus to our efforts to ensure that everyone in the Island is able to enjoy a sense of well-being."
While Guernsey performs well compared with other jurisdictions in most areas, there are exceptions. One example is where survey respondents were asked whether they feel they have someone they could rely on in times of trouble. 86% feel they have an adequate support network. This is lower than most OECD countries, even if only by a small amount.
The indicators represent outcomes for the community as a whole and they tend to change slowly. It may take some years for incremental improvements as a result of policy changes to make a noticeable impact on these indicators. Building a longer time series of these indicators by collecting this data annually is therefore important to our ability to track these changes. The indicators are under continuous review to improve their comparability with the OECD's standard indicators so future editions will be able to include further comparisons with other jurisdictions.
The publication is available online at www.gov.gg/indicators.
