Ipsos MORI's Annual Overview of Britain
June 16 2006
More than 300 people, largely from the public sector, are attending today's Ipsos MORI annual event, 'The State of Britain'. This year, the event assesses whether the Labour government's policies are truly going awry or whether there are successes behind the negative headlines.
A recent study by the agency compared Britain with the US, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, and found that the British have the lowest levels of confidence in their government when it comes to dealing with immigration, crime and terrorism.
This is also clearly feeding through into overall views of the Prime Minister, with confidence in Tony Blair lowest of the six leaders - and support for the Labour government is on a par with the now ousted Berlusconi government in Italy.
Today Ipsos MORI is releasing a mixture of new data and analysis including:
- Health: New research shows confidence in healthcare has fallen by 32 points between May 2005 and 2006. This is the largest fall for any area of domestic policy. Despite this, satisfaction amongst people using the National Health Service remains high - 70% or more of patients were satisfied or very satisfied with their GP, outpatient and inpatient services. Acute trusts need to think about reputation (which they're already doing) and also building patient - and GP - loyalty.
- Transport: When overall satisfaction with transport services is examined geographically, areas of high satisfaction are within London and metropolitan areas, while more rural areas such as Cornwall and Sussex have much lower levels of satisfaction. This may reflect the potentially greater difficulties providing transport services in more rural areas. There is a direct correlation with car ownership: satisfaction with transport services decreases as the number of vehicles in the household increases.
- Education: The Government thinks it is doing a good job and in theory (looking at stats on education standards, number of teachers, entry into HE etc) it is. However, there is a perception gap, and a big one. The public is only just giving them the benefit of the doubt on their performance, parents are confused and the profession is definitely not on board.
- Crime and Justice: People like ASBOs... They like immediate action against those who act in an anti-social way. But the public's relationship with the police, their councils, and community groups need to be taken into account - and for perceptions to improve they need much more information about what is being done, backed up with visible proof.
The company is online at
www.mori.com .
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
