Public Services Performance Tracker
Our flagship project assesses the comparative problems faced by critical services such as the NHS, schools, local government and criminal justice.
Public Services Performance Tracker is an ongoing analysis of the performance of public services. It brings together more than 250 indicators to analyse spending, demand, staffing and performance. The analysis examines the comparative, and in many cases interconnected, problems faced by public services.
The main output of the project is an annual report assessing performance across nine services that is published each autumn. In addition to this, shorter reports use the Performance Tracker data to rapidly respond to live policy debates, dig deeper into the drivers of trends identified in the annual reports, or assess the performance of an additional public services.
Since 2024, it has been produced in partnership with the Nuffield Foundation and an advisory group has been established to help steer the project.
Fixing public services: Priorities for the new Labour government
The government’s status quo spending plans from April 2025 onwards will likely mean that all services other than general practice, hospitals and schools could be performing worse in 2027/28 than in 2019.
Read the report
Read previous editions of the Performance Tracker annual report
Performance Tracker 2022/23: Spring update
Public services won’t have returned to pre-pandemic performance by the next election.
Performance Tracker 2022
Public services won’t have returned to pre-pandemic performance by the next election.
Performance Tracker 2021
The pandemic has created huge backlogs in public services – failing to address these backlogs now will push up costs in future.
Performance Tracker 2020
The coronavirus crisis has resulted in backlogs across public services, including at record levels in the criminal courts.
Performance Tracker 2019
Performance Tracker 2019 projects the demand and spending on nine public services for the next five years.
Performance Tracker: Autumn 2017
Our analysis reveals the key decision points that the Chancellor faces in the run-up to his first Autumn Budget.
Performance Tracker: Spring 2017
Until recently the Government managed to maintain the quality of public services while controlling spending. But this approach has now run out of stea
Read other outputs from the project
Enabling Integrated Care Systems to work better
Most of the money that flows to the NHS now goes through ICSs.
Performance Tracker team
Nick Davies
Programme Director
Stuart Hoddinott
Senior Researcher
Philip Nye
Senior Data Scientist
Thomas Pope
Deputy Chief Economist
Cassia Rowland
Senior Researcher
Darwin Kim
Research Assistant