Election poll tracker: How do the parties compare?

Conservative MPs will be hoping that the tax cuts announced in the Budget will please voters. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt cut the main rate of National Insurance for employees from 12% to 10%. Now he’s gone further with an additional cut to 8% and he also cut the rate for self-employed people. The latest poll by Ipsos MORI has the Tories down to 20 per cent.

That is the lowest level of support for the party since it was formed in 1974. The figures are the lowest for the Tories since they were first recorded in 1951. The Tories are expected to make cuts to public sector pay in 2015. Most recent figures from a YouGov tracker suggest that slightly more people think the government taxes and spends too much, rather than too little.

Probably the differences here are connected to question wording. And the most recent figures suggest that people think the government tax and spend too much. All polls are based on a sample of people interviewed, typically more than 1,000. There is always a margin of error, meaning the real percentage could be higher or lower than any one poll suggests.

We estimate that the true support for each party lies within the ranges shown here. British Polling Council members agree to the same rules on transparency. But the council has said membership should not be seen as a guarantee of quality. Most of the polls included cover Great Britain, although some do poll the whole of the UK.

We summarise all that information with an average line that makes it easier to understand the trend. We include data that is in the public domain. People surveyed do not get the option to choose parties which only stand in Northern Ireland. Some polling companies will not publish all data for all parties at the same time.

It is common for polling companies to do their work for news organisations, television programmes and campaign groups. Nine out of 10 polls just before election day have been within that range. Conservatives and Labour might be within five percentage points of our average. The gap has been smaller for other parties which campaign throughout Great Britain and smaller still for the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

Our estimate of a party’s support is a rolling average of polls taken over the previous fortnight. The precise wording of the question varies between pollsters. If a poll has a smaller proportion of female respondents than there are in the wider population, their responses will be given extra weight in the final results. Some pollsters ask more than one question to reach their voting intention figures.

Some polling companies have not given interviewees the choice of some parties. Reform UK has only been included as an option in every poll featured in our tracker since autumn 2022. Support for Plaid Cymru is included among “other”" parties in polls released by Techne.

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