Case Studies

Valuing Life and Health Using Wellbeing Data | Ongoing

Client: UK Department for Transport (DfT), delivered in partnership with London Economics 

Type of Project: Standards & Methods Development 

Description: The values of life and health sit at the centre of appraisal across UK Government: the value of a prevented fatality (VPF), the value of a life year (VOLY), and willingness-to-pay for a quality-adjusted life year (WTP-QALY). DfT commissioned new empirical research to put these values on a firmer footing, deliberately triangulating three methods rather than relying on one: a primary stated-preference survey, and two complementary non-stated-preference approaches delivered by our consortium: revealed preference (led by our partner, London Economics) and wellbeing data (led by our team). Our workstream estimates these values directly from wellbeing data, measuring how people’s life satisfaction responds to fatality risk and to health-related quality of life, and deriving the change in income that holds life satisfaction constant (the “compensating differential”). The resulting estimates are reconciled with the WELLBY methodology already embedded in HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance. The project shows The Standard in practice: not applying an existing official value, but helping to set it. 

Final report expected in May 2027.

Investing in Early Warning Capability for Floods and Storms: An Appraisal of Benefits and Costs for New Zealand | April 2026

Client: New Zealand National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA)

Type of Project: Wellbeing Appraisal  

Description: What is better flood-and-storm early warning actually worth? Working to the New Zealand Treasury’s CBAx framework, we appraised the benefits and costs of investing in early-warning capability, modelling the baseline harm of floods and storms, the share that earlier warning would avert, and the full social value, in wellbeing and in dollars, with confidence tiers and different climate scenarios tested throughout. The result is a defensible case for investment, and a repeatable product: the same approach runs Green Book-aligned in the UK and CBAx-aligned in New Zealand. 

Read the report here. 

The Happiness Dividend: Making the Business Case for Employee Happiness | April 2026

Client: Reward Gateway | Edenred 

Type of Project: Bespoke Research 

Description: Does it actually pay, in hard commercial terms, to have happier employees? Reward Gateway | Edenred asked us to settle the question with evidence rather than assertion. We brought together the best available research – laboratory experiments, large-scale field studies, and data on millions of workers – to define what happiness at work is, how to measure it with a few validated survey questions, what drives it, and what it delivers. The verdict is consistent across individuals, business units, and financial markets: happier employees are roughly 10% to 12% more productive and around 30% less likely to leave, while firms that score higher on employee happiness see roughly 18% higher productivity, 21% higher profitability, and about 20% higher firm value. The report distils all of this into a practical, decision-ready guide for business leaders and HR teams and a clear message: with only a third of HR teams measuring happiness directly, most organisations are leaving value on the table. 

Read the report here. 

Impact Evaluation of the NHS Volunteer Responders Programme | November 2024

Client: Royal Voluntary Service (with the NHS), Academic Study (The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024)

Type of Project: Wellbeing Evaluation, Wellbeing Valuation 

Description: Did volunteering during the pandemic improve lives, and if so, by how much? England’s NHS Volunteer Responders programme let us answer causally: we used the programme’s oversubscription and a smartphone app’s random allocation of tasks to isolate the real effect, not just a correlation. Volunteers gained markedly in life satisfaction, sense of worth, social connection, and belonging. Valued through wellbeing, the programme generated around £178 million in benefits against roughly £3 million in costs – about thirteen times the £13.7 million the conventional method (volunteer hours at the minimum wage) records in the national accounts. 

Read the report here. 

A Lifetime Wellbeing Ready Reckoner: A Feasibility Study | July 2023

Client: UK Department for Education (DfE)

Type of Project: Policy Modelling 

Description: The values of life and health sit at the centre of appraisal across UK Government: the value of a prevented fatality (VPF), the value of a life year (VOLY), and willingness-to-pay for a quality-adjusted life year (WTP-QALY). DfT commissioned new empirical research to put these values on a firmer footing, deliberately triangulating three methods rather than relying on one: a primary stated-preference survey, and two complementary non-stated-preference approaches delivered by our consortium: revealed preference (led by our partner, London Economics) and wellbeing data (led by our team). Our workstream estimates these values directly from wellbeing data, measuring how people’s life satisfaction responds to fatality risk and to health-related quality of life, and deriving the change in income that holds life satisfaction constant (the “compensating differential”). The resulting estimates are reconciled with the WELLBY methodology already embedded in HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance. The project shows The Standard in practice: not applying an existing official value, but helping to set it. 

Final report expected in May 2027. 

What Was the “Feelgood” Factor of the London 2012 Olympics Worth? | July 2019

Client: Academic Study (Journal of Public Economics, 2019) 

Type of Project: Wellbeing Evaluation, Wellbeing Valuation 

Description: Can you put a credible number on national feelgood? Hosting the 2012 Olympics was a natural experiment: London won the bid, Paris narrowly lost, and Berlin offered a clean comparison. Tracking the life satisfaction of 26,000 people across the three cities, we identified a real, if temporary, rise in Londoners’ wellbeing during the Games and translated it into a willingness-to-pay of roughly £2.2 billion. The honest conclusion – not worth it for London on its own, but plausibly worth it once a modest spillover to the rest of the UK is counted – is the point: clients buy a number that withstands scrutiny, not a flattering one. 

Full report available upon request.

The Value for Money of a National Emergency Management Capability | Ongoing

Client: New Zealand National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA)

Type of Project: Wellbeing Appraisal

Description: What is a national emergency management capability worth to a country, and what makes it deliver? Following our flood-and-storm early-warning appraisal for NEMA, we were asked a broader question: the distinctive public value of New Zealand's national emergency management capability, together with the coordination, direction, prioritisation, and advice that come with it. Extending the same wellbeing-appraisal method from floods to the full range of natural hazards, working to the New Zealand Treasury's CBAx framework, under a governance group including the Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, we model the annual costs of disasters across market, economic, fiscal, wellbeing, environmental, and cultural dimensions; the share averted across the four Rs of risk reduction, readiness, response, and recovery; and the distinctive contribution of national coordination itself. Monetising wellbeing through the WELLBY alongside standard economic data, the appraisal will produce the net present social value and benefit-cost ratio with confidence tiers, discounting, climate scenarios, and a break-even test for rare, high-consequence events. The aim is to understand what drives public value and resilience at a system level.

Final report expected in November 2026.

Assessing the Value for Money of Educational Interventions: A Consistent Appraisal Framework for Education | Ongoing

Client: UK Department for Education (DfE), delivered in partnership with University College London (UCL) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), as part of the Economics of Education Research Centre (EERC)

Type of Project: Standards & Methods Development

Description: How should a government department appraise the value for money of everything it funds, not just whether one programme works? DfE asked us to develop a consistent, education-specific framework for doing exactly that: grounded in HM Treasury's Green Book, and its forthcoming wellbeing update that our team is writing, but specialised to education. Rather than evaluating a single programme, the framework resolves the questions any education appraisal must answer: how to link short-term measured effects to lifetime benefits; which units of account to use, running income alongside QALYs for health and WELLBYs for wider wellbeing, with clear rules against double-counting; how to handle variation across pupils, settings, and places; and on whom the benefits fall. It is built iteratively: an initial guidance analysts can use at once, strengthened with longitudinal cohort evidence, then tested on real case studies across the learner lifecycle, including early years, teaching, post-16, SEND, attendance, and consolidated into a final report and toolkit, co-produced with DfE. The output is not another evaluation but the method by which DfE appraises education spending on a consistent footing – setting the method, not merely applying it.

Final report expected in June 2028.