Central Government Research At Ipsos MORI

Providing evidence and insight to inform the public service reform agenda

Ipsos MORI's Central Government research unit focuses on the issues that matter at the heart of government.  Our research is used by the Government to inform its strategic objectives.  Among the key issues facing the public sector that we research and think about are:

• customer focus in service delivery
• public sector reputation and stakeholder audits
• public service strategy and delivery
• social marketing and public engagement
• leadership and employee commitment

We work closely with the centre of government, as well as with policy-makers across Whitehall, public services, and in the wider political environment such as think tanks, the interested private sector and the media.  Our work has explored how much the general public and public servants understand and support the reform agenda and the associated organisational change, and how successfully this is communicated and delivered throughout central and local government and other public service providers.

Our research and expertise goes further, covering broader issues that shape the delivery of public services in modern society, and the underlying relationship between government and the governed, such as trust, the impact of place, the local/national perception gap and how to engage the public in the policy-making process.

We have also developed an insightful approach to measuring and understanding reputation in the public sector. Based on the Ipsos MORI Reputation Framework, we use a tailored approach with a small set of core questions to cover the basic building blocks of reputation for public bodies - leadership and strategic priorities, performance and delivery, partnership working, and communications - combined with an in-depth understanding of the wider policy context and stakeholder needs. We have carried out a wide range of qualitative and quantitative stakeholder audits across the public sector, for central government departments, local councils, regulators, agencies and other public bodies.

What our clients say about us:

"Given this was a cross-government report, the team's expertise across a number of sectors was invaluable."

"I was expecting the research to be rather superficial, but it effectively addressed some of the issues that it has taken me 20 years to understand fully"

"Good sparky staff."

"Ipsos MORI consistently met deadlines, responding comprehensively to additional requests often made at very short notice, and delivered the main findings to the Executive Management Team in a manner that was very well received."

"Fantastic flexibility and worked really well to a difficult brief."

The Ipsos MORI Delivery Index

Since 1997, we have been carrying out a regular health check of the public's assessment of government performance, and their expectations for the future. It focuses on expectations for public services and the economy generally as well as on key public service areas. The Ipsos MORI Delivery Index has established itself as an important tracker of public confidence in the delivery of key public services, and has been featured regularly in papers such as the Guardian, Observer, and Financial Times, as well as quoted by the BBC and other news media.

Blair's Britain: The Social and Cultural Legacy

Modern government, policy-making and politics take place against a changing cultural and social backdrop. Our report, Blair's Britain: The Social And Cultural Legacy, explores the way Britons think and behave, their values and aspirations, and how these have changed during the Blair years. It brings together our wealth of social research data and places this in the context of social commentary and research done by others. It looks back at the last decade as a way of better understanding what the future might hold before presenting a new conceptual framework for policy-makers, communications practitioners and social marketers. This report is partnered by Blair's Britain: The Political Legacy, which looks at the way voting behaviour and political attitudes have changed over the past decade, and focuses on the public's political mood and the state of the country at the point of Blair's departure.

Exploring Trust in Public Institutions

The Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute carried out this research for the Audit Commission, involving a programme of desk research, focus groups and survey research to explore the concept of trust in public institutions. The study looked at different definitions of trust, whether it was increasing or decreasing, differences between different types of public services and with the private sector, and the impact of trust on public engagement with, and use of, public services. In particular, it attempted to create a model of the key drivers of trust in public institutions, in order to understand how they might start to foster greater levels of trust between themselves and the public that they serve.

Understanding Satisfaction: Customer Attitudes to Public Services 

Understanding and measuring customer satisfaction is vital to public service reform. But many efforts at understanding customer priorities are simplistic and do not provide information that services can act on. The Office of Public Services Reform at the Cabinet Office commissioned us to review the full range of approaches to customer satisfaction research and to highlight new and effective techniques that can be applied across the public sector. Part of our work included this report reviewing different approaches to customer satisfaction research, and highlighting key issues for managers to consider and the methods most suitable for different types of organisation.

The More Things Change ... Government, the economy and public services since the 1970s.

This report, which analysed our trend data going back to the 1970s, sheds valuable insights on recent changes in British attitudes. It shows changes in the political cycle, including how attitudes towards government react to external events (such as Black Wednesday, the Falklands and Iraq, the ‘fuel crisis', and so on); how the issues that most concern the public are public services - very different to the 1970s and 1980s when unemployment and the economy dominated the scene - with the biggest recent change the rise in concern about immigration and asylum; and how the link between perceptions of key public services and perceptions of government is not straightforward: even if public services improve, the government may not get the credit.

The Workers Index

In partnership with The Work Foundation, we have carried out several waves of research monitoring employee motivation in the private and public sector, including advocacy of their organisation, attitudes to senior management and priorities for improvement. This complements our other research in this area, which has examined the public sector ethos, and the characteristics of great leadership in the public - as well as, of course, all our employee attitude surveys for individual public bodies.

Cabinet Office / Strategy Unit / Number 10 - National Debate on relationship between citizen and state

This project was commissioned to inform the Cabinet of public views on the important but intangible issue of how the citizen would ideally interact with the state. The results fed directly into the Public Service Policy Review that has now been published. We adopted a multi-stage methodology, with an initial desk research period to ensure that the project built on what we already know. This was followed by regional workshops which introduced participants to the complexities of the questions being put to them. Participants then completed tasks set in a 'briefing pack' over the period of a week and 50 participants, reflective of the country as a whole in terms of attitudes and behaviours, were then invited to London to take part in a full day of deliberations in Number 10. The findings were presented to the Cabinet on 8th March 2007. The full report is available from our website http://www.ipsos-mori.com/citizensforum/.

The Key Drivers of Satisfaction with Public Services

This research for the Cabinet Office examined the most important aspects of service provision that drive overall satisfaction with public services. The study asked a representative sample of the general public about their experiences of a range of public services, and analysed the findings to see whether a generic set of key drivers could be found. As a result, we identified a set of five key drivers of satisfaction with public services: delivery, timeliness, information, professionalism, and staff attitude. This research has been influential across government - the recent Charter Mark Review recommended that these key drivers should help form the basis of the new Charter Mark standard.