What the public think of local public services will matter more in future.

And for some, this is a worrying development. The public, after all, are deluded, and only half report being satisfied with their authority’s overall performance, despite record CPA scores. 
Many of the standard accusations about the fallacies of opinion research as measures of perception are ill founded, but one common stumbling block is that communities with lower expectations tend to be more easily pleased than those with higher expectations. In practice, wealthy middle-class areas almost always have higher satisfaction levels than poorer, more deprived ones – does that mean all wealthy neighbour-hoods have low expectations and deprived ones high expectations? Or that councils in those areas are automatically better? Both seem unlikely.
But the Comprehensive Area Assessment regime poses real challenges. It is absolutely the case that more deprived and heterogeneous communities tend to be more negative, generally. One has to hope that the Audit Commission and CLG will be intelligent in their analysis of results. In our Shiners and grousers study in 2005, we found North Easterners were among the most positive about local government, NHS services and policing and services such as banking and water companies. In contrast, outer London boroughs faced some challenges, many were challenged, and the public was markedly less satisfied with NHS services than elsewhere. 
One of the things CAA may throw some light on is the challenges of place. If all public services in an area are rated less positively than elsewhere by residents, it is just possible that there are multiple failures of management and governance. Alternately, it could well be that there are structural factors behind public sentiment.
If this plays out in the autumn, some areas will have real challenges bucking the combined effects.