Levels of belonging 'lowest in UK'

Researchers said the UK's poor performance on the "key element of social well-being" was indicative of a "highly individualistic culture".

And the UK did not fare much better across the population as a whole, coming 20th when it came to levels of trust and well-being. Only Slovakia and Bulgaria were worse.

The report, by the independent think-tank the New Economics Foundation (nef), also found that the UK performed poorly on combined measures of social and personal well-being, coming 13th out of the 22 European nations surveyed.

The group called on European governments to adopt the National Accounts of Well-being - released for the first time today - as a way to improve public policy-making and said a nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of national income, "fails as a meaningful measure of social progress".

Nic Marks, founder of the group's Centre for Well-being, said: "It is clear that our obsession with GDP has failed to deliver better quality of life for all. We need a better compass to guide us."

He went on: "Governments have lost sight of the fact that their fundamental purpose is to improve the lives of their citizens. Instead they have become obsessed with maximising economic growth to the exclusion of other concerns, ignoring the impact that this has on people's well-being.

"The UK's long hours culture and record levels of personal debt, have squeezed out opportunities for individuals, families and communities to make choices and pursue activities that would best promote personal and social well-being."

Denmark, Switzerland and Norway showed the highest levels of overall well-being in the survey, while central and eastern European countries such as the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Hungary had the lowest.

A Communities and Local Government spokeswoman said: "We recognise that young people are a key part of society and play a crucial part in addressing issues facing their communities. That is why the Government is working hard to give younger people greater influence over the local decisions that affect them and more opportunities to get involved in their communities." http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/(New Economics Foundation)

What Mr Brown has to say about UK recession

Gordon Brown said today that the recession now gripping Britain was unlike any others since the Great Depression, caused not by domestic economic mismanagement but by a "complete market failure" set off by the sub-prime crisis in the United States.

As statisticians confirmed the UK's first recession since 1991 and the largest quarterly contraction in 28 years, Mr Brown - who spent ten years as Chancellor under Tony Blair before taking over as Prime Minister - said co-ordinated international action would be the key to lifing the global economy quickly out of the downturn.

And he insisted that he and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, had had no choice but to commit billions of pounds of public money to shoring up the banking system because the "cost of inaction" would have been much greater.

"Every recession in the last 60 years in Britain has been caused by inflation, domestically generated, caused by wages getting out of control on some occasions, by interest rates having to rise," Mr Brown told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.