We work across the full policy cycle: appraising policies, programmes, and investments before decisions are made, and evaluating their impacts afterwards. We also analyse and quantify social value, build forward-looking models to simulate the likely wellbeing impacts of different interventions, develop industry standards, and carry out bespoke research for our clients. The result is robust wellbeing evidence our clients can defend.
For decades, the value of policies, programmes, and investments has been judged by what people are willing to pay, usually revealed by their behaviour in markets. But much of what governments, businesses, and the third sector create is value that no market ever prices, and yet it is amongst the strongest drivers of people's quality of life, such as:
- Mental and physical health
- Social connection and relationships
- Local community and pride in place
- Good work
- Culture, heritage, and history
- Volunteering and civic participation
- Trust – in other people and in institutions
- Safety and security
- Green space and the natural environment
- Climate change
The science of wellbeing changes everything. It gives us a common currency to measure and monetise these impacts, and so make them count: the WELLBY (“Wellbeing-Year”), and the wider methods and tools that surround it.
Governments are already adopting them. In the UK, HM Treasury’s Green Book – the official guidance on policy appraisal across UK Government – now allows policies, programmes, and investments to be appraised in WELLBYs, (at £13,000 in 2019 prices), and New Zealand’s Treasury has followed suit. But the WELLBY works just as well for a business or funder weighing where to invest, or for a charity demonstrating the social value of its work.
The question is no longer whether to measure and monetise wellbeing, but how to do it credibly and defensibly.
That is what WAVE, the Wellbeing Appraisal, Valuation & Evaluation Hub, exists to do.
Our distinctive strength is authorship: WAVE grows out of the Wellbeing Programme at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), one of Europe’s leading economic research centres, where modern wellbeing economics substantially originated and whose researchers developed the WELLBY and helped to write HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance on Wellbeing. We pair that authorship with rigorous conceptual and empirical analysis, to a publishable standard, and the discipline of producing credible numbers rather than flattering ones. For clients whose decisions must withstand Treasury, audit, and public scrutiny, that combination is decisive.
See how we put this to work in our Services, or get in touch to discuss your project.