Who is furthest from being In a Good Place?

To take the 40 years of impact we have under our belt and scale it, digital, data and AI will be key. We’re embracing rigorous data and evidence like never before to target our efforts to ensure everyone in England and Wales is in a good place.

That meant starting with understanding who is furthest from a good place – the people this strategy is for. We commissioned the experts at Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) to help us get started.

At Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI), we’ve been working in partnership with Lloyds Bank Foundation to support a more robust, evidence-led approach to their investments in communities.

The core driver of this work is to ensure that everyone in England and Wales is in a good place - personally, at home and within their communities.

To support this, we’re developing the Good Place Index. This helps us identify the neighbourhoods across England and Wales where the most people are not in a good place live. We’ve also been using data to understand how many people in England and Wales are not in a good place, and learn more about who they’re likely to be. 

What is a good place?

When we talk about a “good place”, we mean how people are doing and feeling, not just what an area looks like on paper. By being in a good place personally, in a home that’s a good place to live, and in a community that’s a good place to belong to, we see so much more take root. It leads to improved wellbeing and resilience to bounce back. We see people form strong relationships, have access to the right support and choice and control over their lives, and fair opportunities to thrive. This is what being in a good place looks like.

Understanding who is furthest from being in a good place

The Lloyds Bank Foundation’s In a Good Place strategy is clear about what happens when people are in good place, and has defined five outcomes they’re basing their work on:

• Wellbeing - the extent to which we feel satisfied with the quality of our lives
• Agency - our ability to make choices and have control over those choices
• Resilience - access to people and finances that enable us to recover from shocks
• Trusted connections - high-quality relationships, including people from different backgrounds from us
• Opportunities - access to the things that improve our lives

We started by bringing together a wide range of national datasets aligned to these outcomes. And because the Foundation wants to make a difference locally, we worked with datasets that would help us understand what’s happening in neighbourhoods of around 1,000 to 3,000 people (at Lower-layer Super Output Area (LSOA) level), to build the Good Place Index. 

A key focus throughout was balancing a strong, reliable method with usability to ensure the Index is both robust and practical for decision-making. There were lots of choices to make along the way about how to strike that balance. For example, it was clear to us early on that we needed to build separate indices for England and Wales. We’ll share the choices we made openly in our methodology paper when we release the Good Place Index in full.

Which neighbourhoods are furthest from being in a good place?

The Good Place Index lets us identify the neighbourhoods where the conditions that support a “good place” are weakest. For the purposes of the analysis, this focuses on the lowest-performing 10% of neighbourhoods – those facing the most significant and overlapping challenges.

The results show that these areas are not evenly distributed. Instead, they tend to be clustered geographically, particularly in post-industrial towns and cities, coastal communities, and parts of the Midlands and North of England. In England, places such as Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Hull and Stoke-on-Trent stand out as having particularly high concentrations of neighbourhoods in the lowest-performing group. In Wales, a similar pattern emerges, with higher concentrations in the South Wales Valleys and some coastal and urban areas.

These patterns reflect long-standing structural problems, where challenges relating to economic opportunity, resilience and community infrastructure often build up within the same places. 

Estimating how many people are furthest from a good place

At the same time as building an Index that lets us look across geography, we know there are people who not in a good place in themselves in every constituency in England and Wales. Alongside identifying the neighbourhoods that are furthest from a good place, Lloyds Bank Foundation also needed to understand more about the people who are furthest from a good place.

That started with knowing the number of people who are furthest from being in a good place. 

To do this, we developed the People Not in a Good Place (PNGP) measure. This uses national survey data to identify individuals who are not experiencing the five outcomes identified above. We then used this to estimate how many people this represents across the whole population. 

This approach shows that close to one in four people across England and Wales are not currently in a good place.

• 15.6 million people in England (23.5%)
• 860,000 people in Wales (23.4%)

Who is most affected?

The Foundation’s strategy recognises that we’re not all in the same place. Our starting points are not all the same. And because people are far more than one thing, more than one part of their identity, more than difficult circumstances or the barriers that stand in their way, it’s important to understand how the different parts of someone’s life can interact to affect whether they’re in a good place or not.

The PNGP measure is starting to shine a light on some of those factors. For example, it shows that disabled people and people from LBGTQIA+ communities are much more likely to be furthest from a good place.  People in social rented housing are significantly more likely not to be in a good place also; education, class and job opportunities matter; and the chance to make a difference is crucial – something which is not evenly spread.

What’s next?

The Good Place Index and the PNGP Measure are starting points, and still in development. But there are three clear next steps:

• Further refinements. Between now and the Autumn, we’ll be refining the Index’s methodology and strengthening some of the measures – particularly those like trust, belonging and feeling in control that are hard to get data for at neighbourhood level. Once this is complete, we’ll publish our findings in full for everyone.
• Turning insight into action. The Foundation is using the draft Good Place Index to test a new approach to selecting priority areas for investment, and already considering how to use it to track change over time. This allows us to test its use in real decisions.
• Sharing openly. There’s a strong ambition to make the Good Place Index and its insights widely and easily available to working in and with communities, to support more coordinated, evidence-led evidence decisions. The Foundation is already collaborating with two other funders to widen its potential for impact. And we’ve started by bringing the data to life through our Local Insight platform, which allows anyone to explore the data in an interactive and visual way. Together, we’re working towards making the Index open and available for all.

The Good Place Index adds an important layer to how we understand community need, complementing measures like the Index of Multiple Deprivation and the Community Needs Index by bringing in a broader view of how people are doing day to day. We’re looking forward to sharing more soon.