The Politics of Polling (Liaison Committee Report)

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this new format, which allows your Lordships’ House an opportunity to revisit previous committee reports and consider what changes, if any, have arisen as a result of the work undertaken. Like others, I continue to be grateful to my noble friend Lord Lipsey, who is a paragon in this field, and to his colleagues, for their work in this area. As he noted at the time of the original report and repeated today, it was not so much about recommendations for the Government, but rather offering a commentary on some of the trends and developments in the field. As noted by the Liaison Committee’s 2020 report, polling throughout the general election for 2019, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, seemed to be rather more accurate than during the 2015 and 2017 elections, and—notoriously—the EU referendum.

As we have learned, there are likely to be a number of reasons for this: different political contexts, changes in how polling is carried out and understood, the sorts of questions asked and how they are asked, and so on. However, as noted by the House of Lords Library briefing, the US presidential election served to highlight that polling reliability, or the lack of it, is not exclusively a British challenge. I hope we will see a number of changes to the conduct of polling in the future, and perhaps also the conduct of British elections in coming years. Of course, we are to have some of these as a by-product of the Government’s recent Elections Act, and although on the face of it these should not impact on polling, it would be interesting to hear from the Minister whether they gave any consideration to this as part of those reforms. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment when he comes to reply.

There is every possibility that we will have some debate on polling-related issues when we come to discuss the forthcoming media Bill, which will have a broad scope and perhaps give rise to some of the issues to which the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred. It has been suggested by experts such as Professor John Curtice that media regulators be given a role in regulating the reporting of polls. This change would sit alongside industry initiatives to improve the understanding of polling practices but comes with the logic that the problem is the interpretation of the data rather than the raw data itself. In other words, it is more a question of how polling is used than of its content. As a semi-anorak who is fascinated by electoral outcomes, I have long been interested in the relationship between early polls during a by-election campaign and the eventual outcome. Of course, we have the now famous corrupted use of bar charts and their impact on electoral performance to thank for some of this, although I think they are now rather more the subject of challenge.

Questions seemingly remain about the role of the British Polling Council. While it is an independent organisation, and while the Minister may not wish to go into a huge amount of detail, it would be helpful to know whether there has been any shift in the Government’s previous position on self-regulation and whether there have been any general meetings with representatives of the BPC as part of the usual stakeholder engagement process. In an age of fact checking, does the Minister think that there is a case for some form of regulation of the polling industry? If there is, perhaps the Minister will set out how it might work.

This is a fascinating subject and one that those of us interested in the art of politics tend to dwell on perhaps more than we should. The health of a democracy cannot be measured through polling, although polling does, of course, help to promote a healthy democracy, or at least it should.