Lloyds Bank Foundation’s In a Good Place strategy aims to ensure that everyone in England and Wales can be in a good place personally, at home and within their community. To translate this ambition into targeted action, the Foundation needed robust evidence showing who was furthest from being in a good place and where they were most likely to live.
The Foundation defined being in a good place through five outcomes: wellbeing, agency, resilience, trusted connections and opportunities. These cover how satisfied people feel with their lives, their ability to make and act on choices, their capacity to recover from shocks, the quality of their relationships and their access to opportunities that can improve their lives.
Understanding these outcomes required two complementary forms of analysis. The Foundation needed a neighbourhood-level measure showing where the conditions that support a good place were weakest. It also needed to understand the number and characteristics of individuals who were not experiencing the five outcomes, including people living outside the neighbourhoods with the highest concentrations of need.
The work therefore needed to combine a statistically robust approach with practical usability. It also needed to account for differences in the available data and policy contexts across England and Wales while producing insights that could inform real investment decisions.
We began by reviewing a wide range of national datasets and identifying indicators aligned with the five outcomes in the Foundation’s strategy. We focused on data available at Lower-layer Super Output Area level, a small statistical geography generally covering neighbourhoods of around 1,000 to 3,000 people.
We used the selected indicators to develop the Good Place Index, which assesses the conditions that support wellbeing, agency, resilience, trusted connections and opportunities across neighbourhoods. Because the data landscapes in England and Wales differ, we developed separate indices for each nation rather than forcing the available evidence into a single measure.
Throughout the process, we balanced statistical reliability with the need for the Index to remain clear and usable. We considered how indicators should be selected, combined and presented so that the final measure could support practical decisions while maintaining a transparent and defensible methodology.
The Index identifies the lowest-performing 10% of neighbourhoods as those where the conditions supporting a good place are weakest and where residents may face the most significant overlapping challenges. Our analysis found that these neighbourhoods were geographically concentrated, particularly in post-industrial towns and cities, coastal communities and areas of the Midlands and northern England. In Wales, higher concentrations were identified in the South Wales Valleys and in some coastal and urban communities.
Alongside the geographic analysis, we developed the People Not in a Good Place measure using national survey data. This identified individuals who were not experiencing the five outcomes and allowed us to estimate how many people this represented across England and Wales.
The analysis estimated that close to one in four people were not currently in a good place, representing 15.6 million people in England and 860,000 people in Wales. It also provided insight into groups more likely to be affected, including disabled people, people from LGBTQIA+ communities and people living in social rented housing.
We delivered draft versions of the Good Place Index for England and Wales and the People Not in a Good Place measure, alongside analysis of their emerging findings. We also brought the neighbourhood-level data into Local Insight, allowing the Foundation and its partners to explore patterns interactively and test how the Index could support the selection of priority areas for investment.
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