The British state now knows more about its citizens' views of public services than any other country in the world. An Orwellian prospect? Er, no. In the last year, in my new role as global head of public sector research at Ipsos, I have visited every continent, some rather more often than I might like. Meeting my colleagues working for public bodies throughout the world has shown how the rise of performance management, and the desire to put user and public experience at the heart of delivery, has led Britain to measure public attitudes to a wide range of services at a more local level than virtually anywhere else in the world except, perhaps, Singapore. Every two years, local government collects detailed views from around 500,000 people via the Place survey, and every hospital and GP collects data on user experience, as well as every police force. But I am not worried about 1984 revisited. While we may collect this data, most public services have little capacity to mine it or, better still, to merge this data locally and get added value from it. Every piece has a postcode, so it can be mapped at street level. Yet I often sit in meetings with local authority chiefs, health service directors and chief constables, who have only the crudest analysis to go on. The challenge we are embracing now is meta analysis, looking beyond administration boundaries to understand what is really going on. Why are people in a cluster of streets straddling two wards so negative about health, but not local government services, or vice versa? Meta analysis of the mass of data we have collected can frequently give us all the power to make more difference really locally.
