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1. Introduction
Background
1.1 Since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, key areas of policy making have been devolved to Scotland, with the aim of allowing Ministers and MSPs to align their policy agendas more closely with the needs of the Scottish people. It was hoped that devolving control over key areas, like health, education and public transport, would facilitate improvements in public services in Scotland. Since 2004, the Scottish Executive 2 has funded a module of questions in the Scottish Social Attitudes survey covering public attitudes to government and public services in Scotland. The module aims to contribute to evaluations of public services in Scotland and to inform the devolved policy agenda.
1.2 This report builds on previous Scottish Social Attitudes reports for the Scottish Executive Office of Chief Researcher (particularly Bromley & Given, 2005 and Given & Ormston, 2007), and is based on data from the 2006 SSA. It starts by summarising public views on priorities for Scottish Executive action over the last three years, before moving on to discuss findings from two sets of questions about standards in public services.
- The first set of questions focused on the impact of the Scottish Parliament on the health service, education and public transport. Do people think having a Scottish Parliament has increased, reduced, or made no difference to standards in these areas?
- The second set asked people whether they thought standards in the health service, education and public transport, as well as the economy and general standards of living, had increased, fallen, or stayed the same in the last 12 months.
The former were designed to tap attitudes to the impact of devolution on public services in Scotland, while the latter provide an up to date measure of perceptions of the performance of key services more generally, irrespective of what this is attributed to.
1.3 The report discusses the two sets of questions separately first, drawing out key differences in attitudes towards health, education and public transport and examining trends in assessments over time. It then considers whether perceptions of the impact of the Scottish Parliament on services differed from views on public service performance in the last 12 months. Did some people believe that standards in the health service, for example, had increased in the previous year, while still believing that having a Scottish Parliament has made no difference to this area? It is argued that differences in the groups who gave positive answers to each suggest that perceptions of the impact of devolution on services are driven by somewhat different considerations from those which drive perceptions of public services in general. Improving public perceptions of the performance of public services in general may not, therefore, automatically lead to much more favourable assessments of the impact of devolution.
1.4 The final section of the report examines who, in 2006, the Scottish public actually held responsible for recent standards in public services - was it the Scottish Executive, the UK government, or did they attribute them to something else altogether? Trends since 2001 are explored: these confirm findings from earlier reports that people are gradually becoming more likely to view the Scottish Executive, rather than the UK government, as responsible for key devolved policy areas. Finally, the report considers whether this shift towards seeing the Scottish Executive as responsible has occurred among all groups of people in Scotland, or whether the beliefs of some groups have shifted more rapidly than those of others.
1.5 The key questions this report addresses are summarised in the box below.
Key questions
- What are the public's priorities for Scottish Executive action?
- What effect do people think having a Scottish Parliament is having on public services in Scotland?
- How do people rate the performance of public services in Scotland in the last year and how has this changed over time?
- How do perceptions of the impact of having a Scottish Parliament on public services compare with views of public services in the last 12 months?
- How have perceptions of responsibility for standards in public services changed over time?
The data
1.6 The data come from the Scottish Social Attitudes ( SSA) survey, conducted by the Scottish Centre for Social Research (ScotCen). SSA is an independent survey that aims to provide high quality survey data on a wide range of social and political attitudes in order both to inform public policy and to facilitate the academic study of public opinion. This report details the survey's most recent findings based on interviews conducted in 2006/7. Between August 2006 and early January 2007, a random sample of 1,594 adults aged 18 plus resident in Scotland was interviewed, representing a response rate of between 56% and 58% 3. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in people's homes, using computer assisted personal interviewing. Ninety per cent of respondents also completed a paper-self completion questionnaire. Further technical details about the survey are included in a separate technical report. (Cleghorn, Ormston & Sharp, 2007).
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