Project summary

Carnegie UK is exploring what an approach to public revenue raising and spending with collective wellbeing at its heart could look like. We have identified four initial areas of focus for this programme of work, to help us understand the context, build the evidence base, and develop insight into the relationship between collective wellbeing and our public finances. We will identify practical steps decision makers can take or principles they can apply to put collective wellbeing at the heart of decision making. 

Many people feel that public services are underdelivering and they cannot access what they need, when they need it. Our social contract has broken down. We will explore what a new contract for our time looks like. All governments have difficult decisions to make – but how can we collectively create the conditions for those decisions to be the right ones? 

Prevention, resilience, and long-termism are a vital part of this conversation, to help make sure that decisions made are the right ones both for those of us here now and for the generations yet to come. 

Countries such as New Zealand have already embedded collective wellbeing in their spending decisions. We plan to bring together international evidence on these wellbeing spending frameworks to compare the approaches and explore their impacts. 

Finally, tax is a central feature of this conversation, but approaches to taxation vary across the UK, as do the fiscal frameworks within which our various tax systems operate. We plan to map these approaches and bring them together in an accessible way, to encourage coherence and shared learning about best practice.