Customer oriented public leisure services in the United Kingdom

The customer is the ultimate judge of the adequacy of public sector leisure provision. In this environment are leisure services provided that customers actually want or does the public sector merely produce what they think their customers want? Moreover, to what extent are the preferences of customers included in the decision-making process in determining the provision of leisure services? To address these and other issues the views of chief leisure officers working in local authorities within the UK have been investigated. This paper presents some of the results of a quantitative survey concerning their attitudes towards customer orientation.