TRUST
REPORT
October 2025 – October 2026
A retrospective view on a turbulent year of action and reaction.
Foreword
Deane Greenouff | CEO
Trust. It’s something that underlies everything in the public sector. When trust is healthy, people follow guidance, engage with their local organisations, and feel safe in their communities and homes. When it breaks down, even simple, helpful messages get lost in a sea of misinformation and scepticism.
Over the past year, the public sector has been working under relentless pressure and constant change. You’ve had to navigate a landscape shaped by sudden violent threats, localised health outbreaks, and national political uncertainty.
At Orlo, we wanted to look past the noisy headlines and listen to what people are actually saying, feeling, and asking during these moments. When a crisis hits a community, social media posts and media queries aren’t just internet chatter, they are direct cries for clarity, reflections of anxiety, and real time signals on how well public sector organisations, like yours, are connecting with the people they serve.
This report pulls back the curtain on 12 months of data, taken from Orlo Insights across multiple listening streams, across the public sector. The goal is to offer a clear, honest look at how public sentiment and emotion moves, how much they trust what they’re hearing, how they really feel, and how we can all communicate with a bit more empathy, speed, and accuracy when it matters most.
10
Key events that shaped trust.
2.5m
Sources listened to.
1.36m
Relevant mentions analysed.
-100%
Trust scores ranging from -100% to +33%.
Contributors
Hannah Hill
Content Marketing Manager
Rosie Knight
Head of Value Delivery
Becky Price
Training Manager
Rory Simmonds
Implementation Consultant
Sarah Bate
Head of Customer Success
What this report is about
Every day, millions of people interact with the UK public sector. They see updates, reach out for information and engage in thousands of social media posts that impact their day to day lives.
This report looks back from October 2025 to October 2026, to trace how trust rises and falls across 10 key moments. By tracking actual conversation volumes, public sentiment, and emotional changes during these major public sector events, we want to give comms professionals and senior leaders a clear picture of what the public actually experiences when big stories break.
In short, we’ve listened to 2.1 million sources to analyse 1,360,000 relevant mentions to bring you real data, on real trust from real citizens.
How we captured this data
All the data, key themes, sentiment scores, trust scores, and emotional metrics in this report were captured using Orlo Insights, our AI powered social listening and media monitoring tool, designed specifically for the public sector.
As the community engagement platform of choice for over 400 public sector organisations across the UK, Orlo is uniquely positioned to cut through the digital noise. To build this report, we used Orlo Insights to analyse hundreds of thousands of online conversations across broadcast press, news media, and social channels.
Key features behind this data gathering include:
The Orlo Trust Indicator: Inspired by research from Harvard Business School and driven by a unique algorithm, this measure tracks the underlying drivers of trust and distrust in real time, giving users a way to quantify public confidence. It works by analysing real-time sentiment and proprietary emotional markers to generate a continuous trust score from -100% to +100%.
AI-Driven sentiment and emotion tracking: Orlo analyses semantically similar themes to break down complex public emotions, tracking real time shifts in emotions such as confusion, curiosity, anger, sadness, and desire.
Community insights: By monitoring both loud viral trends and the “silent majority,” Orlo Insights captures a true representation of public voice, helping organisations understand the who, what, and why behind these online conversations.
But before we dive straight into every event in detail, here’s a quick look across a whole year’s worth of data, and the three big lessons that stand out for anyone working in public sector comms.
Key lessons
Crises can have a second wave: A crisis rarely ends when the immediate danger passes. Across our data this year, the second wave of news, policy debate, or political commentary often triggers a second spike in confusion, and distrust. Don’t pack up your crisis comms kit as soon as the first wave settles – be prepared to go again!
Misinformation moves fast: As soon as anything takes hold on social media, public confusion spikes. We’ve seen it happen a lot over the last year and at the rate social media moves, it’s no wonder that people don’t wait quietly for updates. They fill in the silence with their own speculation, which, when left unchecked, can turn a manageable situation into a major trust crisis in a matter of hours.
Trust can fall overnight, but can be rebuilt with consistent comms: A single confusing policy drop or delayed incident report can wipe out public confidence overnight. Rebuilding that trust takes weeks of steady, consistent, and transparent communication from local leadership.
So, who’s ready to dive straight into the facts?
