David Cameron misses the point... you can only claim there's more to life than money if you have some in the first place

Do money and financial stability dictate how content or otherwise we are with the cards that fate has dealt us, or can the quality of our lives be measured more broadly? It's more than five years since David Cameron first talked about creating a Happiness Index and, depending on your political persuasion, it's either foolish or brave of him to reveal that he is investing £2m of public funds to see whether there is something in the idea or not.

Let's cast aside for a moment the cynics' knee-jerk condemnation of the plan because it comes from a man who's not short of a bob or two. Let's forget that the economy is in a mess and that George Osborne cuts an unlikely figure to get us out of it. And let's not ask the tediously open-ended question as to whether the index, like the Big Society project, is a smokescreen to divert our thoughts away from economic blight.

If happiness is not the pound in your pocket, what is it? Job satisfaction isn't all about pay—there was a famous strike by BBC secretaries over their earnings where they ended a picket not by being offered more money but with a new job title. From then on, they became production assistants. Seemingly, that made them happier than extra cash.

In my restaurant company, I help create a corporate culture whereby we support the local community not as an extra duty on top of our day jobs but rather as a core responsibility. For example, I regularly host breakfasts with local schoolchildren, then take them for a tour of Borough Market in south London before handing them over to chefs, receptionists, managers and the bar team, who give them real life experiences. The children love it, but so do we. The other day, one of our managers noticed that a table was celebrating their mother's birthday and so she went into the kitchen and arranged a birthday cake. In both these cases, everyone was happy and we didn't make any money.

A fictitious prime minister, played by Hugh Grant in the film Love Actually, stood up to an aggressive US president trying to ride roughshod over the UK by saying the British were rightly proud of what we are and what we have—from Big Ben to David Beckham's left foot. We all felt good that he stood up against a superpower. We felt happy.

But the question that we don't yet have an answer for is, what is it that allows us to evaluate quality of life. We have a welfare state but it's in a pretty shambolic condition. We have a royal family that we are happy with and the Queen is now officially cool with a Facebook page and her recent donning of 3D specs. William and Kate give us all a warm glow despite the fact that we will all come to a standstill for more than a week to witness them tying the knot.

So, apart from students, the unemployed, the elderly, the infirm, the homeless, the poor, flailing businesses, and the families struggling to make ends meet, we can echo Lord Young's much maligned but true comment that many people have never had it so good.

Mortgages are cheaper, I can buy four shirts for what it used to cost me to buy one, bargain hunters are having a field day through websites such as LivingSocial and Groupon, cars are cheaper than ever, and I can employ MBA graduates for under £30,000. They're pleased to have a job and I'm glad I can recruit emerging talent that otherwise would have eluded small and medium-sized businesses.

But, unfortunately, you can only say there's more to life than money if you have some in the first place. Coming from an old Etonian prime minister, it could easily sound as if this is a call to go back a couple of centuries to the master-and-serf society where everyone knew their place, content with what fate had dealt them. None of us would want openly to see a return to those times but I'm happy that I can buy four shirts for what it used to cost me to buy one and it's quite possible that in the year ahead I will be able to buy four businesses for the price of one in the past.

So the bad news for Cameron is that my happiness comes at somebody else's unhappiness. Remember, unemployment is still high, NHS and education standards slip with every clip, and we've achieved little in Iraq or Afghanistan.