After Afghanistan, It's War — Over Public Services

The National Health Service has regained poll position as the issue of most concern to most people in Britain, pushing the war into second place. Service delivery (lack thereof) by the Blair government is salient. Recently the media are talking about the Tories' resurgence. The runes I read do not look happy for the occupants of Nos. 10 & 11.

• Two people in three consistently over the past three years have said that the public sector is 'underfunded' despite announcements of the interjections of more and more money.
• There have been sharp drops in perceptions of the public sector as 'friendly' 'keen to help', and 'efficient'. The public, that 800-pound gorilla, is stirring.

Q "These are some words that people have used to describe public services (like schools or hospitals). Please read through the list, and read out the letters that you think apply."

Few give the government credit for doing a good job of delivering on their promise to improve public services when we measured it in 1998 for the 'People's Panel', the Cabinet Office's noble effort to understand the public mood (now being wound up). Then only 15% rated public services as being 'good value for money' and only one in ten as 'open' and 14% as 'honest'. Yet even these low scores have halved over the past three years.

For the five years between 1992 and 1997 literally scores of BBC and other media pundits and interviewers challenged me saying 'Yes, the public tell pollsters they are willing to pay more taxes, but that's not how they voted in 1992!' They were wrong then, and have since forgotten, if they ever knew, the evidence in 1997 when a MORI/Times poll found that 61% of the public said they expected an incoming Labour Government to raise taxes (despite their promises to the contrary), yet gave them the biggest landslide for fifty years.

Blair told the voters that 1999 was the year of delivery. It wasn't delivered. Then came the run up to the 2001 election, and attention turned to the alternatives that would be offered in the polling booth, and most people decided there wasn't one. In January 2001, six months before the election, a MORI poll for the Sunday Telegraph found that twice as many people thought if the Tories were to win the election, public services would get worse than if Labour were re-elected, and, astonishingly, twice as many expected taxes to rise if the Tories were elected than if Labour was returned. Yet neither of these nettles were noticed, much less grasped, by the Conservatives. No wonder it was 'Labour's Second Landslide'!

At the time of the general election, a majority of the public believed that 'in the long term, the government's policies will improve the state of Britain's public services', by a margin of 54% to 32%. Since then, there has been a swing of nearly ten percent against the government, with our October measure for the Times standing at 45% who thought it would, but 42% saying they lacked confidence in the government's ability to deliver on their promise to improve public service.

Recently Dr. Madsen Pirie and I recently published a booklet, The Wrong Package, for the Adam Smith Institute, identifying what the public's priorities are in three important areas of public services, police, education and local government. The top three were:

• Police: 'targeting criminal gangs and organised crime' (57%), 'tackling muggings and street crime' (49%), and 'deterring crime by being visible on the streets' (45%)
• Education: 'concentrate on basic skills such as reading, writing and comprehension' (62%), 'reduce class sizes' (51%), and 'teach children in classes with other children of similar ability' (27%)
• Local council: 'install closed-circuit TV to deter crime and vandalism' (49%), 'keep council estates in good repair' (47%), and 'tackle litter, graffiti and dog dirt' (41%)

The public's views are clear. They do not think public services are satisfactory, they think they are underfunded, and they say they are willing to pay for better public services if they believe the government is going to use the money effectively to provide for better services. The Tories have finally awakened to the importance of improving public services as a potentially election winning theme, after two election defeats virtually ignoring public concern. The Liberal Democrats are broadening their focus from education. The Labour Party is talking a good game, and the Chancellor's seemingly grasped the nettle. The question is, will the government follow through and deliver on their promises?

The jury is out, confidence is sliding, and the clock is ticking.