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7. How do perceptions of standards in the last 12 months compare with perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament on public services?

7.1 Are people's assessments of standards in public services in the last 12 months different from their views about the impact of the Scottish Parliament on these services? An initial look at the data suggests that people were indeed answering these two sets of questions differently.

• First, people were clearly much more likely to say that standards in key public services had fallen over the previous 12 months than they were to say that the Scottish Parliament has had a negative impact on public services. Taking public transport as an example, just 8% said that the Scottish Parliament was reducing standards in this area (Figure 1, above). However, 19% believed that standards in public transport in Scotland had, in fact, fallen in the previous year (Figure 2).
• Second, positive perceptions of standards in health, education and public transport in the last 12 months were not necessarily related to thinking that the Scottish Parliament was having a positive effect on these services. For example, in 2006 45% of those who believed standards in the health service had improved in the previous year nonetheless thought the Scottish Parliament was making no difference to standards in health (Table 4). This is unsurprising given the finding (reported in Bromley and Given, 2005 and Given and Ormston, 2007, and discussed again below) that people do not always attribute responsibility for standards in health (or education, or public transport) in Scotland to Scottish governing institutions.
• This relationship obviously works both ways - believing the Scottish Parliament was having a positive impact on a public service was not necessarily associated with giving a positive assessment of the recent performance of that service. For example, 34% of those who thought that the Scottish Parliament was increasing standards in education nevertheless believed that standards in education in the previous 12 months had either fallen or stayed the same (Table 5).

Table 4 Perceptions of the Scottish Parliament's impact on standards in public services, by perceptions of standards in the last 12 months (column %)

Table 5 Perceptions of standards in the last 12 months, by perceptions of the Scottish Parliament's impact on standards (column %)

What explains differences in perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament on public services compared with perceptions of standards in these services in the last year?

7.2 These differences suggest that judgements about the performance of public services in the last 12 months may be driven by different factors to judgements about the overall impact of devolution on public services. Given the difference in question wording, it might be expected that judgements about the impact of the Parliament on public services would reflect views about devolved government in Scotland in general. For example, if someone is not in favour of devolution, you might expect they would be reluctant to say it was having a big impact on public services. On the other hand, there is perhaps less reason to think that assessments of recent public service performance will be linked to judgements about devolution and the devolved institutions. Given this, we might anticipate finding some of the following differences in responses to the two sets of questions:

• We might expect a stronger association between constitutional preference and the impact of having a Scottish Parliament than between constitutional preference and perceptions of standards in the last 12 months. Were supporters of devolution or independence more willing to say things had not been going well over the previous 12 months than to say the Scottish Parliament has not delivered?
• We might also expect to find that awareness of the activities of the devolved institutions is more closely linked with assessments of the impact of the Parliament on public services than with assessments of standards in those services in general.
• Attitudes towards the impact of the Scottish Parliament may be more closely associated with trust in politicians, while views about recent standards may reflect 'lower-level' assessments based on actual experience of schools, hospitals, buses, etc.
• We might expect that those who think the Scottish Executive has most influence over how Scotland is run will be more likely to be positive about the impact of the Parliament on services than those who believe the UK government is most influential. Moreover, we might also expect that the difference between these groups will be greater with respect to their attitudes to the impact of the Parliament on services than with respect to their perceptions of standards in public services in general.
• Another possibility is that when assessing the impact of the Parliament, people are more influenced by their political affiliations. For example, SNP supporters may (at the time of the survey fieldwork) have been more willing to say that the Scottish Parliament was having a positive impact than to say that things had recently been going well under a Scottish Executive which was then headed by other parties.

7.3 In order to test some of these assumptions, a comparison was made between those factors found to be associated with positive perceptions of standards in the last 12 months (full tables for which are included in Annex A), and those associated with positive perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament. A summary comparing key factors associated with each set of statements is given below (Table 6). Those factors found to be significantly associated with holding a positive perception of standards are marked by a tick (a cross indicates factors which were not significantly associated with positive perceptions).

Table 6 Factors significantly associated with positive perceptions about standards in public services

7.4 This comparison and the analysis which informs it suggest some key differences in factors associated with assessments of the impact of the Scottish Parliament, compared with assessments of recent performance in public services. In relation to the hypotheses outlined above, attitudes to the impact of the Parliament on public services did indeed appear to be much more closely associated with attitudes to devolution and the devolved institutions in general than are attitudes to the recent performance of public services per se. In particular, analysis showed that:

• Whilst constitutional preference was important in predicting perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament on health, education and public transport, it was not significantly associated with perceptions of standards in public services in the last 12 months. As discussed at paragraph 4.11, those who supported either devolution or independence were more likely than those supporting Westminster rule to say the Scottish Parliament was increasing standards in these areas. But they were no more likely to think standards had increased in the previous 12 months.
• Level of awareness of Scottish Executive activities was important when people were assessing the impact of the Scottish Parliament, but not significant when assessing standards in the last 12 months. People with more awareness of the Scottish Executive were more likely than those with little awareness to say the Scottish Parliament was increasing standards. But perceptions of recent standards in public services did not appear to be particularly related to awareness of action the Scottish Executive may have taken in these and other areas.
• Trust in government appears to be related to both perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament on public services and perceptions of the recent performance of those services. However, there is some evidence to support the hypothesis that there would be a stronger relationship between trust in the Scottish Executive and attitudes to the impact of the Parliament on services than between trust and perceptions of public services more generally. For example, those with high levels of trust were much more likely than those with low trust to think the Scottish Parliament was increasing standards in the health service (35% compared with 5% - a gap of 30 percentage points). The equivalent figures for those who thought standards in the health service had increased in the last 12 months were 29% for the 'high trust' group and 10% for the 'low trust' group - a smaller gap of 19 percentage points.
• Beliefs about who has most influence over how Scotland is run were associated both with perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament (for health and education), and with assessments of standards in the last 12 months (for education and public transport). However, in relation to the impact of the Parliament on education there was a fairly big difference in the views of people who thought the Scottish Executive had most influence vs. those who thought the UK government most influential (39%, compared with 27%). On the other hand, there was little difference in the views of these two groups with respect to education standards in the last 12 months (30%, compared with 27%). ¹⁵ Thus, in relation to education at least, it seems true that judgements about the impact of the Parliament on standards are more strongly associated with beliefs about the influence of the devolved institutions than with perceptions of recent standards.
• The final hypothesis discussed above, that views about the impact of the Parliament on public services might be more closely related to party political views than views about the general performance of public services, does not in fact appear to be supported by the 2006 data. Party political identification was not significantly related to any of the questions about the impact of the Parliament on public services in multivariate analysis, once other factors were controlled for.

7.5 To summarise, this report has demonstrated that it is possible to be positive about the recent performance of public services in Scotland without being positive about the impact of the Parliament on those services. It has also shown that views about recent public service performance do not seem to be as strongly related as views about the impact of the Parliament on those services to support for devolution in principle, awareness of the activities of the devolved institutions, or perceptions of the relative influence of the UK government vs. the Scottish Executive over how Scotland is run. One implication of these findings is that improving public perceptions of the performance of Scottish public services will not necessarily be associated with any corresponding improvement in assessments of the impact of devolution and the devolved institutions.

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