Britons’ trust in public institutions like the judiciary, the BBC and Parliament is in decline. People are instead investing their trust in individuals. But for the sake of a functioning democracy, politicians must help rebuild trust in institutions, rather than undermine it for their own benefit, argues Ros Taylor.

Political trust is vital to the healthy functioning of a democracy. The social contract, and the belief that voting is a meaningful act, depends on our confidence that a government will do what it has promised. If politicians show themselves to be untrustworthy, people will look elsewhere for security.

It is also an exceptionally hard concept to nail down. We can measure it — but only to a degree. The Edelman Trust Barometer and the World Values Survey are the international leaders in this field, with the Hansard Society and polling organisations doing valuable work at the national level. We can ask people to say how much or how little they trust politicians, institutions, and arms of the state, such as the police and the NHS. This gives us an impression of public sentiment. But it does nothing to explain why they mistrust (or distrust — there’s a difference) these bodies, nor what could be done to change it. That’s because trust is not readily explicable. It exists in a space somewhere between the rational and emotional.

What we do know is that Britons tell surveys that they trust politicians and public institutions less than they did. Some of the recent scores are quite abysmal. Twelve percent trust the Lords, the same percentage as trust political parties. Nineteen percent trust the news media. IPSOS found that only three percent of Londoners trust politicians to tell the truth. Distrust is not confined to the current government: only a quarter of the public find Keir Starmer trustworthy. Interestingly, we still trust each other — more, in fact, than many European countries do. Britain ranks quite highly on levels of interpersonal trust.

What sets Britain apart from other mature democracies? Why do we trust our government less, even less than Americans do?

If institutional trust is an increasingly rare and valuable commodity, it could be because it is shared out much more thinly than it used to be. Living in a city involves countless micro-acts of trust, from buying a sandwich to catching a bus, from being recorded on CCTV to dropping your child at school. Where once you trusted British Rail, or didn’t, now you can distrust 28 train companies and the state-run organisations that control many of their operations. The choice of news media has exploded: indeed, parts of it devote some of their energies to undermining trust in public service broadcasters. Our interactions with each other, business, and government are now mediated through tech companies and authenticators, all of whom we must trust to act in an ethical way — even if we do not have the time or knowledge to judge their trustworthiness for ourselves. Artificial intelligence could enable us to find new and faster ways to establish trust, if we can trust the people building and using it.

But many of these experiences are common to people in every technologically advanced country, with the state playing a greater or lesser role in them. What sets Britain apart from other mature democracies? Why do we trust our government less, even less than Americans do?

The latest data from the Trust in Government survey, which is administered by the Office for National Statistics, offers some clues. People were asked how well the UK scored 20 measures of integrity, responsiveness, reliability, openness, and fairness. Notably, they thought the government was bad at listening to and acting on their concerns; that its policies favoured some regions and groups much more than others; and that politicians were liable to be tempted by those offering them favours. The only measure on which the UK scored more than 55 per cent was on the administrative information it provided. But this score isn’t very meaningful, as the UK also scored very poorly on explaining how reforms might affect citizens. This paints a picture of a society increasingly aware of its own inequalities and not confident that the government appreciates or understands them. The belief that politicians are acting in their own self-interest rather than the public’s is likewise highly damaging.

While the fact that interpersonal trust has held up is welcome, it is not altogether surprising. Loss of trust in institutions tends to lead people to put their trust in individuals instead.

The expectations people had of the government during the pandemic, and the demands it placed on people during that crisis, probably played into these perceptions. While the UK’s mortality rates were not very different from those in other European countries, senior politicians are widely perceived to have broken the rules they imposed on others, failed to explain complex emergency legislation properly, and put personal contacts at the front of the queue for procurement contracts.

While the fact that interpersonal trust has held up is welcome, it is not altogether surprising. Loss of trust in institutions tends to lead people to put their trust in individuals instead. Fifty-four percent of the public told a Hansard Society audit in 2019 that Britain needed “a strong leader who is willing to break the rules”. Exasperation with a failing or corrupted state makes them more likely to believe that a single individual can cut through stifling regulation and transform national prospects. When this happens, interpersonal trust is a cognitive shortcut that avoids the difficulty of fixing wicked problems and Max Weber’s “slow boring of hard boards”, or the dogged hard work that tackling difficult policy problems requires. The individual may be personally flawed, as Donald Trump for example visibly is, but what matters is their ability to shake up an elite that still believes in the increasingly distrusted institutions.

Politicians may be tempted to cast doubt on the integrity of an institution and deny it support when money is short and they want to lay blame elsewhere.

The task for those who want to rebuild trust in institutions like Parliament, the judiciary and the BBC is to prove that they are still fit for purpose. It means giving them enough funds to perform their functions properly, and ensuring that they have not been captured by special interests. It demands that politicians stop criticising institutions like the judiciary for short-term political gain, or attacking the BBC because it now competes with newer media outlets that offer MPs lucrative contracts. Politicians may be tempted to cast doubt on the integrity of an institution and deny it support when money is short and they want to lay blame elsewhere. Rebuilding confidence in these institutions will not be in everyone’s personal interest. But it is a task the next government must tackle if it wants to arrest the decline in institutional trust, and faith in the ability of politics to improve people’s lives.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

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