What people think of their area
Welcome to the 190th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which dusts off some polling from the summer that is relevant to one of the government’s current priorities.
That is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intentions polls, seat projections from MRPs, and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polling and analysis. These include:
What the polling tells us about parents using apps to track their adult children;
How the UK stands out from other countries in views about Ukraine; and
The trajectory of Your Party in the polls.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten of those insights by starting a free trial now:
For more polling news as it comes during the week, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
And with that, on with the show.
What people think of their area
The government’s Pride in Place programme is designed to “build stronger communities, create thriving places and empower local people.” Or to take the angle that much of the national media coverage has, it is, “a move Labour insiders hope will give the party a boost against Reform UK.”1
Which gives a good reason to dust off some YouGov polling from the summer which I did not cover at the time.
As is common with questions about the state of things, people have a more positive view about their area than about the country as a whole. By 54%-40% people say their area is in a good state, whereas only 14%-82% say the same for Britain.
But when it comes to how things have or will change, even that local positivity takes a beating. By 32%-7% people think the state of their local area will get worse in the next year. (It is 60%-8% for the state of Britain in general.) Moreover by 48%-15% people think the state of their area has got worse in the last 10 years (compared to 75%-7% for Britain).
Overall, 21% are the ‘diehard pessimists’ who think their local area is bad, worse than 10 years ago and also going to get worse. They are, just, outweighed by the 24% of optimists who think their area is good and neither has nor will get worse, rising to 28% if you include those who don’t have a view on some of the changes.
Even so, given the overall figures, there is an obvious opportunity here for a party to impress by being seen to make an impact. Particularly as, veering away from polling to policy for a moment, some of the measures to make an area seem better - such as improved street sweeping, pothole repairs or a new playground in a park - can be done relatively quickly and with little risk compared with many areas of government policy.
Whether the policy will work and whether the polls will move as a result, we should therefore be able to judge in a matter of months rather than years or decades.
Skip the boring socks.2 Instead, this Christmas give the gift of polling insight, crosstab wisdom and raised eyebrows at media coverage with a gift subscription to The Week in Polls.
You can buy a gift subscription here.
Elsewhere from me…
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a 12-month free subscription to the paid-for version of this newsletter (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual rather than grammatical errors, and factual errors rather than disagreements over interpretation. Though messages about both of those are always very welcome.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national voting intentions figures, with the overall picture I painted last week continuing, i.e. of Reform being a few points down from its peak earlier in the year.
The table is also online here and is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next, the latest seat projections from MRP models and similar, also sorted by fieldwork dates. As these are infrequent, note how old the ‘latest’ data is.
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name. Thank you to Survation for clarifying, after I made a comment last time about the number of different question wordings they use, that they basically run three long-term leader trackers. I have therefore split out the two most recently used wordings and will add in the third long-term tracker when there is fresh data for it as well.
The table is also online here with additional details and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historic figures for both voting intentions and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
My privacy policy and other legal information are available here. Links to purchase books online are usually affiliate links which pay a commission for each sale.
Quotes from social media messages are occasionally edited lightly for punctuation and clarity.
If you are subscribed to other email lists of mine, please note that unsubscribing from this one won’t automatically remove you from the others. If you wish to be removed from all my lists, simply reply to this email to let me know.
Photo of newspaper by Andrys Stienstra from Pixabay.
Parents tracking their adult children, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
There has been plenty of coverage recently such as this story from the BBC: “Many parents are turning to their phones to keep tabs on their adult children - but is this OK (if they agree to it) or is it a sign of mums and dads struggling to let go?” The topic is good for getting social media engagement, but does the polling behind the story stand up?
