From the NHS to the Church, our faith in almost every institution has been washed away - David Behrens

Social care is among the worst performing areas with a satisfaction rating of a derisory 13 per cent.

To put that in context, the NHS is now as poorly regarded as basket cases like Northern Rail and Yorkshire Water. And while that’s not a reflection on medical professionals who somehow manage to maintain their bedside manner even without actual beds, it reflects very badly on the managers and administrators who outnumber them.

Confidence was lowest, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, among patients under 65 and those supporting Reform. It is a depressing picture but it does no more than confirm what we already knew.

Yet the health service is not alone in having squandered the trust placed in it by a once grateful nation. Our faith in almost every institution has been washed away by wave after wave of scandal and complacency.

The Church of England knows this as well as anyone and last weekend Justin Welby, the disgraced former Archbishop of Canterbury, knelt at the penitent’s stool and apologised for the way he handled the abuse cases that crossed his desk. He also said he would forgive his friend John Smyth, the Church’s most prolific serial abuser, as if forgiveness was in his gift. Smyth’s victims might take a different view.

The Catholic church is even more discredited, having defrocked more than 50 UK priests for sex abuse in recent years while never admitting responsibility. Yet this week the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, attempted to neuter freedom of choice among his flock by getting them to mobilise their MPs against Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill. Not long ago such a command would have been holy writ but today Nichols may have made himself less popular than even the NHS.

In such a sea of despair it should be hard to single out any organisation as worse than all the rest but one Whitehall department has managed to lower the bar beneath even its own miserable level. Defra, the division responsible for juggling farming and the environment was misconceived in the first place; how do you keep faith with two sectors whose interests are often diametrically opposed? Its solution has been consistently to alienate both.

Several of its officials were hauled before a Commons committee on Tuesday to explain why the Sustainable Farming Incentive, one of the key planks of the last government’s post-Brexit deal for farmers, had been closed without warning.

The scheme had been touted in 2018 as the most fundamental farming upheaval for a generation: farmers were to be paid to make land available for ‘public goods’ like wildflower strips and hedgerow management. But this year the rug was pulled from under them without even the six-week notice they were promised. The cost per farm is something like £95,000.

The Defra officials shuffled in their seats like naughty children when the committee chairman, the Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael, suggested they hadn’t told farmers the truth about what was happening. “It’s not helpful for us to comment on the specifics of individual cases and concerns about what people were expecting,” was how Janet Hughes, head of the programme, broke the awkward silence.

What do you mean, not helpful? You’d just asked farmers to devote weeks of their time to filling out pointless forms for payments they were never going to get; was THAT helpful?

“If you don’t comment on things, how can we understand what’s been done?” demanded Mr Carmichael. Ms Hughes said lamely that the same thing had happened “at least twice before” on her watch, as if that somehow made it better.

Agriculture has had a rough nine months under Labour so there may be some schadenfreude in seeing its nemesis, Rachel Reeves, now gunning for Defra as well. It is one of the departments most affected by her efficiency drive and that means offering its staff incentives to leave.

The farmers who missed out on their sustainable grants might be less amused to learn that the sum on offer to each civil servant who chooses to go is up to – wait for it – £95,000. There’s a lack of trust all right but no shortage of irony.