The real broken Britain: Bad customer service and shoddy systems make Brits wonder if the government can do anything at all

31 March 2025, 16:00 | Updated: 31 March 2025, 16:32

“We are experiencing high call volumes at the moment. Your call is important to us.”

If there’s a soundtrack to broken Britain, this might be it.

Forget culture wars and economic growth for a moment. There’s another, quieter crisis unfolding - one that doesn’t make the front page, but is nonetheless chipping away at national confidence and trust in institutions. It’s a crisis not of failure, but of friction - slow, frustrating, and quietly corrosive.

Our latest report at The New Britain Project, finds that British adults are wasting 1.52 billion hours every year to bad customer service and broken systems, from GP appointment frustrations, to council website malfunctions to endless phone queues, much of it happening during the working day.

It’s the equivalent of the entire working population of Manchester on hold for over a year.

The scale is staggering. But it’s the everydayness that makes it so potent.

We’ve all been there. The online form that refuses to submit. The chatbot that cycles through useless options. The council payment portal that glitches halfway through. These aren’t national crises. But in aggregate, they’ve become a national drain, not just on time but on public goodwill.

Our polling shows 78% of Britons report regular service-related frustration. That’s not a disgruntled fringe, that’s everyone from pensioners to parents to professionals. And notably, it’s not the digitally excluded who are most fed up, it’s the digitally capable, stuck navigating outdated systems.

It’s also gendered. Women report higher levels of frustration, especially in areas like GP access, a reflection, most probably, of who ends up managing the invisible mental load that holds households together.

And politically, the frustration cuts in interesting ways. Supporters of Reform UK and the Greens report the highest levels of dissatisfaction, different ends of the spectrum, but united by a sense that the system doesn’t work and mainstream parties aren’t fixing it.

This isn’t about tech for tech’s sake. Nor is it an abstract conversation about "user experience." It’s about something more fundamental: whether people feel the state is on their side. Whether getting help feels possible or punishing. Whether voters believe government can still do anything well, or frankly can do anything at all.

At a time when trust in institutions is brittle and politics is increasingly shaped by disillusionment, these mundane moments, booking a GP, disputing a bill, renewing a licence, take on disproportionate weight. They're small tests of competence, repeated daily. And too often, the system fails.

So what can be done? Our report, “Computer Says No”, lays out five ways to fix the frustration: shared council platforms, fairer procurement, joined-up data, a universal NHS App, and one secure digital login for all local and national public services.

None of this is glamorous. But these are the kinds of fixes that, done well, could quietly transform people’s daily experience of the state.

In a country where trust is increasingly hard to earn and easy to lose, fixing the basics isn’t just common sense. It’s good politics.

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Anna McShane, Director of The New Britain Project. The New Britain Project is a new female led independent progressive think tank focused on bringing in more women and front line voices into policy making.

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