Client Satisfaction Survey 2020

Following the Prime Minister’s announcement of changes to parliamentarians’ work expenses on 13 January 2017, the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) was established as an independent statutory authority. As outlined in its first Corporate Plan, IPEA’s core objective is to advise, audit and report on parliamentarians’ work expenses in a professional and independent manner, providing clear advice to parliamentarians and their staff, and clear oversight of expenses and allowances through auditing and reporting functions. Ultimately, the role of IPEA is to enable parliamentarians and their staff to undertake their work effectively, whilst ensuring tax-payer money is spent efficiently, effectively and ethically.

In the 2018-2019 Portfolio Budget Statements, clear performance criteria and targets are set from 2017-2021. In order to ensure that these targets are met, and that parliamentarians and their staff’s expectations and needs are being met, IPEA conducted a survey in 2018 and again in 2019 to evaluate satisfaction with the services it is providing, how these are being received, and what, if any, areas of service provision should be a focus for improvement.

Following the 2019 survey, IPEA re-commissioned Kantar’s Public Division to conduct the 2020 client satisfaction survey to provide a robust measure of overall satisfaction with the information and services provided by IPEA to parliamentarians and their staff, and to track progress against previous years’ results.

More specifically the objectives of the 2020 survey were to:

• Understand the ease of accessing the IPEA and identify the level of satisfaction with advice received
• Establish how effective IPEA is perceived to be in administrating and processing travel expenses, allowances and related expenses
• Determine the effectiveness of communication and information channels used
• Evaluate the level of satisfaction with IPEA processes, reports and administrative services
• Seek opinions on service delivery, performance, customer service and relationship management
• Identify and prioritise service improvement opportunities
• Highlight potential service issues to develop and implement appropriate response actions.
• Compare levels of satisfaction year on year and evaluate if satisfaction concerns identified in previous years have been addressed
• For the first time, the research this year also included a series of qualitative interviews with Parliamentary staff to further outlines the findings from this research in response to the above objectives.