The Citizen's Charter is far from straightforward. It is not a single charter, and is addressed more to the users of public services than to citizens as such. Born in political circumstances that appeared to demand that a new Prime Minister ‘did something of his own’, the Charter subsequently developed into an on‐going programme that mixed together the restatement of well‐established entitlements with the proclamation of new management commitments. It is too early to form a clear overall picture of the actual impact of the Charter, but there are signs that its ‘value‐added’ varies considerably from service to service, and that there are several contexts in which charter standards have, as yet, made only a slight contribution to service quality.