The annual Well-being of Wales report is due to be published on 29 September this year. This report will provide an update on well-being in Wales to help us assess whether we are making progress against the seven national well-being goals set by the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. The report considers progress against the 50 national indicators, alongside a range of other relevant data.
As in 2021, an easy read report will be published in addition to the main report to help ensure everyone is able to access statistical information about Wales.
In 2018, we published a separate report on well-being in children, alongside the main Well-being of Wales. This report included analysis of children’s well-being based on the Schools Health Research Network, as well as using the Millennium Cohort Study and other sources such as data on children in workless households from the Annual Population Survey. We’ve received feedback that there’s a gap in data on children, so this year we’ll be producing an updated children and young people’s well-being report alongside the main report.
What else is new with this year’s report?
This year will be the first time that the Well-being of Wales report will include reporting on the national milestones. National milestones assist in measuring the pace of change needed to achieve the well-being goals. The first wave of national milestones were set in December 2021 and will be reported on in this year’s Well-being of Wales report where data is available. The second wave of national milestones are currently being consulted on and are expected to be laid before the Senedd in October 2022.
In December 2021 we also laid an updated set of national indicators. We will be reporting on some of these new indicators for the first time this year. These include:
- Percentage of people in employment, who are on permanent contracts (or on temporary contracts, and not seeking permanent employment) and who earn at least the real Living Wage
- Pay difference for gender, disability and ethnicity
- Proportion of employees whose pay is set by collective bargaining
- Active global citizenship in Wales
- Percentage of households spending 30% or more of their income on housing costs
We’ll update you here on this blog once the report is published, along with a request for your feedback on how we can keep improving it.
Mapping the national indicators to the well-being goals
In a previous blog post in January, we asked for your views on the current mapping of the national indicators to the seven well-being goals. Each indicator was mapped to one or more well-being goals when the indicators were originally set. This helps communicate how each indicator contributes towards achieving Wales’s well-being goals.
Thank you to those of you who responded to the survey. Based on your feedback, as well as discussion with a small group of people from the Welsh Government and other interested organisations, we decided to make some changes. We mapped indicators to additional goals where we felt that there was a clear link between the achievement of the goal and the item measured by the indicator, and we removed them where that link was now less clear.
Overall, we only made a small number of changes, which demonstrates that the original link between goals and indicators is still relevant. Most of the changes we made were for the globally responsible goal, where we asked ourselves “does a change in this indicator have an impact outside of Wales?”.
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