Defra tries, fails to keep secret a poll used to justify legislation
Welcome to the 154th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which takes a look at an attempt by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)1 to withhold polling information - and reveals the poll they did not want us to see actually says.
Then it is a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis.
This time, those ten include polling for one of the big Mayor contests coming up in May.
If you are not yet a paid-for subscriber, you can sign up for a free trial now to read that and all the other stories:
Before we get to all that, a quick mention for MRP fans of the latest YouGov MRP in Australia for the Federal election there, showing Labor just one vote short of a majority.
And with that, on with the show.
Want to know more about political polling? Get my book Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.
Polling transparency rules reveal what Defra withheld
I have recently joined the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in the House of Lords. Not wholly unrelated to that is some of the reference to polling in the committee’s recent work looking at a piece of legislation put forward by Defra.
The legislation would put in place a new regulatory framework for ‘precision bred organisms’ and for the food and feed produced from them.
Precision breeding makes changes to the DNA of plants, but does so in a way that emulates what could have been done via traditional breeding techniques, and so is different from genetically modified plants where the changes include ones that could not have been made via traditional techniques.
There has therefore been a debate about how clearly identified , or not, products containing precision bred plants should be. If the outcome is the same as what can be done naturally, is it no big deal, or if the methods are artificial, is it a big deal?
That is a policy debate but this is a newsletter about polls. So here is what the committee’s report says on polling:
We are not convinced by Defra’s claim that only a minority of consumers would wish to avoid food containing PBOs [precision bred organisms].
The Department refers to a YouGov survey it commissioned in 2022 which found that “over half (57%) of respondents thought the use of gene editing in crops/plants for food production was acceptable, 16% were undecided,2 while 27% thought the use was unacceptable”.
We note that this claim cannot be verified as Defra has not published the survey on the ground that it was commissioned for internal use only to test the effectiveness of departmental communications about the Act. The submissions we received refer to other research which suggests that consumers may be more sceptical.
On request, the Department shared with us further information about the YouGov survey, including that it was an online survey and that it had a sample size of just over 2,000 adults. However, the figures provided by the Department appear to be in response to a single question in a larger survey. We do not know precisely what question was asked, on which other issues feedback was sought or what the responses were to those other questions.
Thus, it is impossible to assess the value of the Department’s evidence on this point, and therefore we do not consider this an acceptable use of data: if survey data cannot be published because it was commissioned for internal use only, it should not be subsequently drawn on … to justify potentially contentious policy decisions.
Of course, if Defra had thought this one through, they would have guessed what would come next. Which is that given the YouGov data is about a political issue and is in part in the public domain, off went a request from me to the firm for them to publish details of the poll, as required under the British Polling Council’s rules.
Which YouGov duly did and you can read all the details that Defra preferred to withhold here.
Although I have doubts (and many suggestions!) about how well the polling industry’s self-regulation works, in this case, the outcome was a clear win for its transparency rules.
The outcome was also easy to predict, which makes Defra’s messing around with not publishing the survey distinctly underwhelming.
There certainly should be reasonable scope for a department to commission polling in confidence around a set of policy choices being debated internally. But once the policy choice has been made, and the polling is cited as a reason for picking that route, it is hard to justify continuing to keep the (taxpayer-funded) polling secret. As well as self-defeating, because the BPC’s transparency rules win out anyway.
More broadly, though, for all that the YouGov poll looks to be a professional poll, properly conducted and with reasonable question wording, it is still just the one poll. Moreover, on a topic such as PBOs, i.e. one which the public generally has given very little consideration too, there is no perfect impartial question wording that can tell you where public opinion sits.
Note in particular that a full 52% said in the poll that they had not even heard of genome/gene editing (the phrase used in the poll), and of the 48% who had, not all will have given it much thought. I would also hazard a guess that a good number of the 48% said yes thinking of gene editing in the human, rather than food, context.
Moreover, of those who had heard of it, only 3% said they were ‘very well informed’ about it. As that is 3% of the 48%, it means that overall only 1.5% say they are very well informed about the topic they were being asked to give views on.
The specific question which Defra cited, whose wording we now know despite the department’s reluctance, is not a bad question by any means. But it does come with an issue, which is that it provides positives about PBOs without providing any possible negatives:
Gene Editing is a scientific technique used to create targeted changes to part of a living thing's DNA to modify its existing characteristics providing beneficial traits such as resistance to disease or better productivity. These changes could also be achieved more slowly by traditional breeding in animals or plants. Having read this definition, how acceptable or unacceptable do you think the use of Gene Edited crops and plants for food production would be?
So on a topic that only 1.5% say they are well informed about, and given positives of PBOs but not given any possible concerns, 57% says their use in food is acceptable.
In other words, a clear majority though the 57% is, using that one question as part of the evidence base for policy is not putting policy on secure foundations.
Rooting policy decisions in good research means you need multiple takes, putting forward the different conflicting cases, to see where public opinion ends up after being exposed to contrary arguments.
Even if Defra has not messed up over its would-be secrecy, relying so heavily on the one poll - on a topic that only 1.5% said they were well informed about - would still have been unwise.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates:
Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:
For more details, and updates during the week as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch-up: the previous two editions
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