The Scottish Government

Title

Public perceptions of public services delivered.

National Indicator/Target

Improve people's perceptions of the quality of public services delivered.

Brief description

The indicator is intended to demonstrate one dimension of the quality of public services, namely satisfaction (not necessarily same as quality) and provide an overview rather than detail on specific sectors. Satisfaction will be measured in relation to 3 specific types of public services where Scottish Government have a policy interest and where they have a high public importance. They are health services; public transport; schools.

Strategic Objective(s) to Which Indicator Relates

This indicator is intended to demonstrate improvement in public services in Scotland (as defined by users). It fits with the wealthier and fairer objective in terms of ensuring public services are available/accessible to all and of an acceptable standard to the citizen.

More Detailed Definitions

Definitions of Keywords

Users of services are covered by the definition (rather than citizens per se).

Evidence Source

In the absence of a single readily available indicator to measure satisfaction with public services a composite measure of the perceptions of the above 3 groups of service user will be developed.

Information on perceptions of each of the three service areas is available from SHS and is available annually. Every other year it is available at Local Authority level. There is no requirement for new data collection but whether to build into pre-existing data collections an over-arching assessment of quality of public services will be reviewed.

Baseline and Past Trends

Baseline year 2007 = 58% (full year's data).

Methodology

The indicator on satisfaction with public services is derived using the question RF10F from the Scottish Household Survey ( SHS). This question was introduced into the survey in 2007, and is asked of three-quarters of the sample (approx 12,000 households a year). It asks:

"Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with each of these council services?" Then lists 8 public services to give opinions on. The three that were used for this indicator were Local health services, Local schools and public transport. The respondent could say:

Very satisfied
Fairly satisfied
Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied
Fairly Dissatisfied
Very Dissatisfied
No Opinion

The indicator is on the basis of the percentage of adults who said that they were very or fairly satisfied with all three services, excluding "no opinion". So, if a respondent said they were satisfied with local health services and public transport, but had no opinion about local schools (perhaps because they were not users of that service) they are counted as being satisfied with the services in their area. The same applies for other combinations of satisfaction and no opinion, except for the small percentage of respondents who answered "no opinion" to all three and therefore were excluded from the denominator.

Data Ownership and Quality Assurance

Scottish Government provide the data as managers of the SHS - which is a National Statistics Output.

Publication of Data

High Level Summary of Statistics

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/16002

Published annually.

The data provided for this indicator is a composite of results in the SHS.