Residents' survey: 'The council is failing to get its message across'

Published on Thursday 19 February 2009 08:47

EDINBURGH council bosses will be heartened by the latest residents' survey, which shows increased satisfaction with the bulk of services they provide. But therefore they might be puzzled by the administration's poor rating for general satisfaction.

Conducted by reputable pollsters MORI, the latest survey shows clear satisfaction over the way the council runs schools, carries out road repairs and generally deals with issues raised by the public, with an improved rating in 19 of 31 key indicators.

In particular there is an overall perception that crime is being dealt with more effectively, highlighted by a marked increase in the number of people who feel safe moving about the city at night since the last poll was published. The fact that 75 per cent now feel secure – compared to only 70 per cent last year – is a testament to the council's attempts to stamp out antisocial behaviour by paying for and deploying extra police officers in the city centre at night.

But only 40 per cent think the council is generally doing a good job, down from almost 50 per cent at the last poll.

Of course, the general public view of councils is low to start with but this will have been compounded in Edinburgh by the unavoidably negative reaction to the disruption caused by the tram works, the botched school closure programme and the widespread cuts in grants to voluntary groups. Irritatingly for local authorities, they are going through this pain because of the freeze on council tax bills, for which the SNP Government is taking all the credit.

So how can it be, leader Jenny Dawe might ponder, that our citizens like what we provide for them but the majority still think we're broadly hopeless? If they think the streets are cleaner and safer and the schools aren't bad why are so many people being beastly to us? Her instinctive answer will probably be that it's all the fault of the nasty Evening News. That's usually the knee-jerk reaction of politicians in this city, as evidenced by the council's communications review, which sought to blame most of their woes on this newspaper.

But the answer is not difficult to find and lies much closer to home. The council simply doesn't know how to get its message across and its own report concluded that it has no clear communications strategy.

For a city the size of Edinburgh and a major organisation with many undoubtedly talented people at the top, the inability to talk effectively to the public is a significant shortcoming. The new survey shows that while Edinburgh might not be well led, at least it seems to be well run.