2013-14 Community Life Survey

The headline findings from the Cabinet Office’s 2013-14 Community Life Survey have been published.

This survey provides official statistics on issues that are important to encouraging social action and empowering communities, including volunteering, giving, community engagement and well-being.

The 2013-14 findings include:

• Volunteering – The increase seen in the Olympics year has been sustained for overall and informal volunteering, but there has been a decline in the proportion of people formally volunteering and participating in social action.
• Charitable giving – The proportion of people giving to charity has held, but they are giving more money than in 2012-13.  
• Neighbourhood – The picture continues to be varied in 2013-14 compared to 2012-13. Positives include an increase in the proportion of people ‘very satisfied’ with their local area as a place to live and maintained levels of pulling together, feeling that the local area has got better, belonging to Britain and community cohesion. However, civic engagement declined, as did the proportion of people borrowing things and exchanging favours with their neighbours, chatting to their neighbours at least once a month and belonging strongly to their neighbourhood.
• Well-being – People’s average ratings for overall life satisfaction and how happy they felt yesterday increased compared to 2012-13 while feelings of their lives being worthwhile and anxiety did not change.

For further information visit www.gov.uk/government/collections/community-life-survey.