Ms Anna Mercer:

I thank Ms Hanna for the question and the invitation today. She asked about well-being outcomes and how that is working in other jurisdictions. Scotland has the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 and Wales has the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. Wales also has a future generations commissioner whose responsibility is to ensure public bodies are fulfilling their duties to long-term planning and to putting well-being at the centre of it. Wales is probably the best example for us to look at locally. The Carnegie Trust facilitated a study trip with a lot of councillors and community planners from Northern Ireland over to Wales to see how it was operating and it was a really useful trip for them. As to whether they are working, both are in pretty early days at the minute. The right signs are there. The problem is the only place doing budgeting to outcomes is New Zealand. We are all limited across the UK by the Chancellor moving to annual budgeting, as Mr. Finucane mentioned earlier, so we cannot plan for multiple years. I believe it was because of Covid we moved away from that commitment but that is an an issue and we must move beyond that.

One of the things that has been really interesting has to do with New Zealand, which is the world leader in this. I read an article in The Guardianrecently by one of the public health experts on New Zealand's response to Covid. As members probably know, New Zealand has been one of the most successful countries in the world in terms of Covid response. The expert said New Zealand's commitment to well-being and seeing its people as its economy had underpinned the response and the value base was part of the success in that. Due to New Zealand putting well-being at the centre of what it was trying to achieve in its response it has been able to have very low levels of death and hospitalisations. That whole approach has been something that has characterised how its public policy is delivered. She said if new Zealand had not had well-being at the centre she did not think it would have done the same thing. There is a lot to learn from other places and a lot to learn locally from community planning, as I touched on earlier. Those are really good working examples of how we could take that forward.