Wednesday 16 April 2008
Satisfaction with council performance, on a range on measures, is rising in London according to the latest set of Best Value Performance Indicator data. Londoners are more satisfied now with the cleanliness of their streets, with their waste collection services and with their buses than they were three years ago and this has had a positive impact on how residents feel about their councils overall. Across the capital, a two percentage point rise in overall satisfaction suggests London councils are managing to achieve what other parts of the country are not — improvement.
The London-wide picture does, however, mask some clear and consistent differences which have emerged from our analysis of the London BVPI data.
Strong performances on street cleaning and parks as well as dramatic improvements in refuse collection and bus services have been matched by considerable increases in overall satisfaction within inner London. The widening gap in overall satisfaction between inner and outer London now stands at six percentage points.
As the role of councils in shaping their communities becomes an increasing priority we see that inner London residents are more likely to say their authority is making the area a better place to live (76% against 68% of outer London residents). Indeed inner London residents are more positive about their quality of life generally — more than seven in ten inner London residents are satisfied with their area as a place to live compared to 66% in outer London.
Closer inspection of the data points to a strong association between residents' quality of life and factors such as deprivation and ethnic diversity, but this is by no means uniform. Within the very centre of the capital, for example in the City and Westminster, we see higher area satisfaction ratings, relative to deprivation levels, than our model predicts — whereas ratings are lower than we might expect (given levels of deprivation) in more outlying parts of inner London. This goes to demonstrate how complex the picture can be and the need for refined analysis and sensitive interpretation of results.
It is young suburbanites who are least satisfied with their quality of life and particularly those from Black or Asian backgrounds. Wealthier Londoners are more likely to be satisfied with their local area but this relationship is weaker where they live among more uniformly deprived areas, suggesting that the general environs in which people live is more important than individual circumstances.
What does unite Londoners about their quality of life is concern over anti-social behaviours. Despite London seeing a drop in levels of concern since 2003, a trend mirrored nationally, there is still a strong relationship between perceptions of a high incidence of anti-social behaviour and low satisfaction with quality of life. The biggest concerns relate to the activities of young people, but it is also the young, perhaps due to higher levels of exposure, who are more likely to express concern about a wide variety of anti-social behaviours. Tackling crime remains the biggest local priority for improvement across the whole of London.
With council performance ratings improving across the capital, it is clear that the gap between inner and outer London, first seen in 2003, has widened. Inner London residents are more positive about their councils and the job they do, and are generally more positive about their quality of life.
However, given the better performance of inner London boroughs, our analysis begins to challenge the received wisdom that says that perceived quality of life increases with distance from the core. It is only by understanding the inter-play of a complex set of factors that councils will become more effective at improving the quality of life in local areas — an issue set to become more important as community empowerment is brought increasingly centre stage.
Ipsos MORI were commissioned by all 33 London Boroughs to undertake their General Survey of residents creating a representative dataset of more than 42,000 Londoners.