There was little change in the personal well-being of people in the Netherlands last year, despite the coronavirus pandemic, national statistics agency CBS said on Monday.

In fact, in 2020, 66.2% of adults described their personal well-being as being good, up slightly on 2019, when the figure was 64.7%. People also had more faith in the police and politicians but were slightly less happy about their social lives, the CBS found.

The agency questioned nearly 8,000 people for the research project, which looked at various issues to determine well-being, including personal finances and jobs, health, social relationships, living situation and confidence in society.

Just 2.6% of the people in the survey gave their lives a score of between one and four out of 10, down slightly on 2019. Men were more positive about their personal well-being than women and young adults were more positive than older people.

There were, however, sharp variations depending on educational level, with 55.1% of people with a low level of education describing themselves as content, compared with 76.1% of people with a university or college degree.

Homes

People in general are, however, happier with their financial and living situation – 85% are happy with the neighbourhood they live in and only one in 10 feel unsafe from time to time.

Confidence in the police has risen from 75% to 77.8% and in the legal system by 3.7 percentage points to 77%. There was also a sharp rise in the percentage of people saying they had confidence in politicians. In 2019, 39.2% said they had confidence in the parliamentary system but that rose to 52.4% last year.

On Saturday, the Telegraaf reported that around one in five people are actually happier in themselves thanks to the lockdown. The figure comes from VU University professor Meike Bartels, who researches genetics and wellbeing, and who has added the impact of coronavirus to her ongoing project to map the nation’s well-being.

The reason for the increase, she said, may be down to being out of the rat race for a time, as well as an end to the fear of missing out, she said. The pandemic had simplified many ‘busy, complicated’ lives, Bartels told Horizon, the EU research and innovation magazine, last December.