Treasury Living Standards Dashboard

The Living Standards Framework is a flexible policy tool that the Treasury uses to bring clarity and consistency to their consideration of broad impacts – as well as sustainability and distributional implications – in the advice they give.

The Living Standards Framework Dashboard is one of the sources of evidence that feeds into the Treasury’s strategic advice. Its main purpose is to inform their advice about cross-government policy priorities for improving wellbeing. Treasury plans to use the dashboard to inform some of the its long-term and strategic products, such as the new four-yearly wellbeing report that the Public Finance Act 1989 amendments will require it to produce.

Loneliness NZ worked with Treasury on the inclusion of loneliness within the Living Standards Framework.

Family and friends domain

The Living Standards Framework is divided into twelve individual and collective wellbeing domains, six institutions and governance domains, and four wealth of Aotearoa New Zealand domains. Family and Friends is a domain of individual and collective wellbeing.

There are six indicators within the family and friends domain:

Loneliness (i.e. percentage of adults who felt lonely at least some of the time in the last four weeks);
Face-to-face contact (i.e. percentage of adults who had face-to-face contact with friends who do not live with them at least once a week);
Social network support (i.e. percentage of adults who report they have friends or relatives they can count on in times of trouble);
A place to stay (i.e. percentage of adults who reported that, if they urgently needed a place to stay, it would be easy or very easy to ask someone they know);
Feeling loved (i.e. mean rating (0=disagree to 10=agree) by young people of feeling loved by the people who look after or care for them); and
Someone to turn to (i.e. percentage of young people who say that they have an adult they could turn to if they were going through a difficult time and needed help).