The tables compare the percentages of residents who rated six aspects of life in a particular city as good, neither good nor bad, or bad in 1980 and 2010.
Overall, positive ratings were the most common for every aspect in both years. However, while education and employment received higher proportions of positive responses in 2010, most of the other categories experienced some deterioration. Transport was by far the least positively rated aspect in both surveys and saw the most substantial decline over the period.
In 1980, healthcare received the highest proportion of positive responses, at 82%. Education and the environment were both rated as good by 72% of respondents, while the corresponding figures for shops and employment were 64% and 62% respectively. Transport performed considerably worse, with only 52% rating it positively and 32% describing it as bad, the highest negative figure that year.
By 2010, education had become the best-rated aspect, with 82% of respondents considering it good, an increase of 10 percentage points. Employment also rose by 10 points to 72%, although its negative rating increased markedly from 10% to 23%, while the neutral figure fell from 22% to just 5%. In contrast, positive ratings for healthcare fell from 82% to 74%, shops declined slightly from 64% to 60%, and the environment remained relatively stable at 71%. The sharpest deterioration occurred in transport, whose positive rating dropped from 52% to 39%, while the proportion rating it as bad rose from 32% to 38%.