Ben Page, public affairs managing director, said that the public’s expectations about the economy and whether public services would improve had returned to the level they stood at when Tony Blair left office.

The polling company’s quarterly “delivery index” has long been used in Downing Street to track the public’s views on public service reform.

In May, as Gordon Brown prepared to take over as prime minister, fractionally more of those interviewed believed the government’s policy would improve the state of the economy in the long term.

By this month the net score between those who believe things will get better and those who believe they will get worse was minus seven.

On public services generally, those who believe things will get worse outnumber those who believe they will get better by 22 percentage points, against 13 in May.

That is chiefly due to expectations over the future performance of the National Health Service declining from a net score of minus 14 to minus 19.

That is nothing like as bad as in September last year, when the proportion who believed services would get worse outnumbered those who believed they would get better by 32 points.

“The NHS remains a key concern for the government,” Ipsos Mori said. But “crime, immigration and pensions are [also] key challenges for the Brown government – most of the public are currently pessimistic about these”.

A mere 20 per cent are confident that the government will manage immigration well, 23 per cent that they will do the right thing on pensions and 23 per cent that crime will reduce over the next few years.

From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/de5492aa-657e-11dc-bf89-0000779fd2ac.html

The dip in Stalinst Brown’s fortunes were highlighted in Health Direct’s post on 18 Sep 2007-
Labour lead halved as voters feel pinch when Gordon Stalinist Brown’s opinion poll lead has halved in the space of a month, making an early election much less likely, according to the latest Sunday Times-YouGov poll of more than 1,800 people.