The newly released British Government’s ‘happiness index’ has rated four London boroughs as the most miserable in the United Kingdom.
Lambeth, Hackney, Islington and Camden scored some of the lowest ratings for happiness while also having some of the highest scores for anxiety. In contrast, three of the happiest places in the UK are far from the capital.
Three are in Scotland – the Highlands, the Scottish Borders and the outer Hebrides while Northern Ireland also scores highly for life satisfaction.
The survey does note that the average life satisfaction has gone up by 3.4% in the UK and 4.6% in London since the Office for National Statistics started compiling that data in 2012.
The initiative began as a plan of then PM David Cameron, who said that GDP was an ‘incomplete’ way to measure the country’s progress.
Looking at the lowest nationwide scorer of Lambeth, the report noted that local environment aspects like pollution can negatively impact well-being as well as health.
The respondents who reported the lowest level of well-being are children in low income Lambeth families. While the average life satisfaction measure in London lags behind to the 7.71 national average, the capital has also shown the most improvement in the six years the data has been collected.
