Scottish Household Survey 2025 findings: Trust in Public Institutions
Data from the Scottish Household Survey (2025) exploring trust in public institutions.
Overall trust in public institutions, 2025
As set out in Table 1 (below), the institutions that adults in Scotland were most likely to express trust in were the Health System (74%) and the Police (74%) in 2025.
Compared with 2023 findings, trust levels for the Police (73% in 2023), the Education System (62% in 2023), the Civil Service (56% in 2023) and the Scottish Government (45% in 2023) remained stable. Trust in the Justice system increased slightly (56% in 2023).
Trust in the Health System (78% in 2023) and in Local Government (53% in 2023) declined slightly (Tables 42, 26, 50, 18, 2, 34 and 10 in the suporting Excel workbook).
Compared with 2023, levels of distrust had increased for six of the seven institutions surveyed. People were most likely to express distrust in the Scottish Government (45%) and Local Government (41%). Compared with 2023 figures, the institutions which showed the largest increases in distrust were Local Government (35% in 2023) and the Health System (24% in 2025 compared with 18% in 2023). (Tables 10, 34 in the suporting Excel workbook).
As shown in Table 1 (below), respondents were least likely to express distrust in the Police (19%), the Education System (20%) and the Civil Service (22%) (Table 1 in the suporting Excel workbook).
Table 1: In 2025, adults in Scotland were most likely to express trust in the Health System and the Police and least likely to express distrust in the Police, the Education System and the Civil Service
Percentage of respondents who trust and distrust public institutions, 2025, Scotland[1]
|
Institution |
Trust it |
Distrust it |
Don’t know or not sure |
Net trust (percentage points) |
|
The Health System |
74% |
24% |
2% |
+50 pp |
|
The Police |
74% |
19% |
7% |
+54 pp |
|
The Education System |
62% |
20% |
18% |
+43 pp |
|
The Justice System |
58% |
25% |
16% |
+33 pp |
|
The Civil Service |
56% |
22% |
22% |
+33 pp |
|
Local Government |
50% |
41% |
9% |
+9 pp |
|
The Scottish Government |
46% |
45% |
9% |
+1 pp* |
*Note: The net trust for Scottish Government was not statistically significant, which means that there was no difference in the proportion of people trusting and distrusting the Scottish Government.
Figure 1: Adults in Scotland reported the highest levels of trust in the Health System and Police, and the lowest levels of distrust in the Police, Education System and Civil Service
Percentage of respondents who trust or distrust public institutions, 2025, Scotland
‘Net trust’ is a derived measure calculated by subtracting the proportion of adults who expressed distrust in an institution from the proportion who expressed trust. Positive values indicate higher levels of trust than distrust.[2]
Net trust was positive for all of the institutions in the survey, except for the Scottish Government (Figure 2 and Table 1). This means that for the other six institutions more respondents expressed trust than expressed distrust. Respondents expressed highest net trust in the Police (+54 percentage points). The net trust for Scottish Government was not statistically significant, which means that there was no difference in the proportion of people trusting and distrusting the Scottish Government.
Figure 2: Net trust is positive for six of the seven institutions
Net trust (percentage point difference between the proportion of respondents expressing trust and distrust) in public institutions, 2025, Scotland
Care must be taken when making comparisons between institutions, because the percentage of adults who said they didn’t know or were not sure whether they trusted an institution varied considerably. For example, 22% of people said they didn’t know whether they trusted the Civil Service, 18% didn’t know whether they trusted the Education System and 16% didn’t know whether they trusted the Justice System, compared with 2% for the Health System (Table 1 and Figure 1).
Because net trust is calculated only using trust and distrust responses, changes in net trust are not directly affected by the proportion of adults who said they did not know or were unsure. This can make comparisons easier where levels of uncertainty vary between institutions. However, net trust should be interpreted alongside the proportions expressing trust, distrust and don’t knows (Table 1 and Figure 1) since similar net trust scores can arise from different underlying levels of trust, distrust and uncertainty.
Footnotes
[1] Responses of ‘Trust it a great deal’ or ‘tend to trust it’ have been amalgamated as ‘trust’ responses in these statistics. Responses of ‘Distrust it greatly’ or ‘Tend to distrust it’ have been amalgamated as ‘distrust’ responses in these statistics. ‘Net trust’ is the difference between the percentage of respondents who expressed trust and the percentage who expressed distrust. Net trust is expressed in percentage points.
[2] For example, the Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Index is a multi-country annual survey which uses ‘net trust’ to generate indices of trustworthiness for professions and countries.
Contact
For enquiries about this publication please contact:
Office of the Chief Statistician
e-mail: statistics.enquiries@gov.scot