Cabinet Office
Overall, recent trends are not dramatic: the step changes in some other aspects of public service delivery are not translated into similar upturns in satisfaction.
For public service decision makers and managers, these results may be somewhat discouraging given real recent achievement in meeting targets for public service improvement: improvements to access and waiting in health, greater police numbers and reduced crime, more teachers and better GCSE results. Several suggestions have been made to explain the apparent gap between public and customer perceptions and the reality of public service improvements, including lack of widespread awareness of improvements which affect only a minority of the population, and the influence of factors which have nothing to do with public services.
Whatever the reasons, these trends highlight the need to understand better the factors which create customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction and work to improve the customer experience of public services.
Whilst the decline in customer ratings of the police we saw for much of the last couple of decades is now arrested, the trend is not yet positive, and below ratings by the public generally. Overall satisfaction with local government is in decline, although trends in satisfaction with specific local authority services are mixed. Other than a noticeable dip post-Hatfield, passenger ratings of most transport services have been constant. In school, where the evidence base is least well established, there may have been some rises in parental ratings, particularly of primary schools. In health, there is some evidence of modest improvements across a number of different services.
Where data exists, there is a wide range in customer satisfaction ratings in different localities. In health, in-patient ratings of quality of care vary from 95% ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ in Papworth and the Royal Marsden to 51% in Newham. In local government ‘Best Value Satisfaction Surveys’, the range is from 78% in the City of London to 27% in Rossendale. Whilst we must of course take account of factors such as the type of areas they serve, this does not account for all the difference in ratings. There are clearly under performers as well as high-performing organisations.