For the last four years we have been exploring practical ways to make people happier. When we started our Local Wellbeing Project with Richard Layard, IDeA (now Local Government Improvement and Development) and three forward thinking local authorities in Manchester, South Tyneside and Hertfordshire, this was definitely a minority preoccupation.

Since then we've seen interest in wellbeing and what it is that makes people feel happy about their lives grow, to the point where measuring wellbeing has become mainstream government policy. David Cameron announced last week that from April next year, national surveys will include questions about people's happiness and quality of life.

The point of measuring wellbeing, ultimately, is to change what government and other agencies do in order to make people happier.

So we're pleased that the government has announced it is going to measure wellbeing alongside economic growth.

However, we also found the information that is most useful is not at the national level. Whether the UK scores 7 or 7.5 when survey results are aggregated, or whether people in the UK are happier or more miserable than in other countries is interesting up to point. What is really useful is very local information that paints a picture of local neighbourhoods, to show how different places are faring, how people feel about their lives and their home communities.

Secondly, to understand wellbeing we need to understand how places that look the same can react very differently to crises and shocks. In the same way that some people thrive when dealing with circumstances that overwhelm others, some places are more resilient than others - they have a greater capacity to recover from adversity.

The resilience of places is related to local circumstances - as varied as the quality of public services, availability of jobs and transport, sense of belonging (and, conversely, isolation) and different forms of social capital. ‘Bridging' social capital, which captures the strength of bonds between different groups, is more likely to signal resilience than ‘bonding' social capital - referring to relationships between people from similar backgrounds.

This thinking was the first step towards what we have now published as WARM - our new Wellbeing and Resilience Measurement tool. This measures assets and vulnerabilities in local communities, how people feel about their lives and how resilient they are to deal with future shocks. WARM has been trialled in Manchester, Tyneside, Hertfordshire, Birmingham and Salisbury.

WARM paints a very different picture of local areas than conventional deprivation indicators. It captures assets and vulnerabilities, and can help people planning services to decide where to target scarce public money.

WARM is a work in progress. We will evolve it as we learn more about how to use this sort of approach in practice. Our hope is that it gives us a new way of assessing local areas, which moves us on from traditional performance measures to a more dynamic (and flexible) way of understanding how to influence the aspect of people's lives that matter most, and how to use this to make us all happy.