An immersive event held in London marked the launch of this year's KPMG Citizen Experience Excellence report, now drawing on insight from 132,000 people. Rather than presenting the findings through PowerPoint, the consultancy firm chose to bring the numbers to life through theatrical storytelling. The evening featured DWP director general for digital transformation Helen Wylie and DSIT director general Emily Middleton alongside over 100 leaders from across the public sector. In an episode of It's Personal, the CSW podcast with KPMG exploring citizen experience, we learn what feeling the data meant for them.
The venue was the Steel Yard, the former merchant trading house that Queen Elizabeth I famously shut down for refusing to collaborate with other traders. Reporting from the riverbank, KPMG partner and podcast co-host Jo Thomson reflects on how, four centuries later, the building offered its own lesson for the night: lasting change is never made in isolation.
This year's theme was “making the shift”, and the research explains why change is needed. Citizen experience scores are flatlining, and despite all government efforts, something keeps getting in the way of real progress.
Building on the report's “3Rs” of remember me, recognise me and respect me, the evening saw actors bring three characters to the stage: a service owner worn down by the gap between effort and impact, a young man searching for work and stability in a system that kept losing track of him, and a charity worker exhausted by having to repeat her story again and again. A school chair, a wheelchair, an office chair and a set of deckchairs were dotted around the stage and gradually fell into disarray as the evening went on, as a visual metaphor for a system that often forgets the person sitting in it.
Audience participation added to the special tone of the night. Guests voted on the decisions the characters faced using Strictly‑style paddles and explained their reasoning, sparking conversation about what good choices look like. Then something unexpected happened. One guest moved by the stories on stage shared their own experience with a public service and found the person responsible for it sitting in the room. Thomson describes it as one of the most profound moments of the evening, when everyone leaned in and recognised how much needed to change.
Civil servants from different corners of the public sector speak in this episode. Kerry Ross from NHS Devon, Paul Clements from the Environment Agency, and Simon Hunter from DWP say what they took from the night, and their feedback points to the same idea: the scale of the challenge can feel paralysing, but the answer is not to wait for everything to be fixed or for the perfect conditions. Pick something, try it, and learn from it.
Beyond feeling the data, this episode highlights the responsibility, and the opportunity, that senior leaders have to act on it.
Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts