The numbers aren’t enough: polling needs transparency

A poll can tell us a great deal about public opinion. It can also tell us a great deal about the person paying for it. When polling makes the news, the first question should not be what it says, but who commissioned it.

Earlier this month we saw just how easily that rule bends. Three polls commissioned for Reform UK ran on the front pages of the Times and the Telegraph, and readers of neither paper were told who was behind them. The British Polling Council, which set the rule, says it was clearly broken.

We have since seen how the bending of the rules goes beyond one firm and one party. In one example in 2023 the Liberal Democrats had Savanta ask voters who was to blame for the state of the country, with six answers on offer: three Conservative prime ministers, the Conservative Party, the pandemic or the war in Ukraine. The results were briefed to the Observer although Savanta did not publish the tables confirming the client, the sample and the full wording until they were asked this month.

Nobody disputes the arithmetic. What was withheld, in each case, was vital information the reader needs to judge it.

Polling reaches the public with an authority other forms of communication – political or otherwise – lack. A poll is read as the voice of the public. That authority is why polling wins coverage and why the rules around it exist. A poll built to make a case, and published with its client hidden, puts an organisation’s – be it a political party, trade association, or business – argument in the public’s mouth.

The public deserves better because, at its best, polling can set the news agenda and inform public opinion in a timescale that few other forms of communication can. Its value is in its independence. Once that independence is compromised by hiding the workings behind it, it can become misleading.

Every such case teaches the public that something presented as a measure of their opinion can also be a vehicle for someone else’s argument. Once that distinction disappears, trust in the measurement goes along with it. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report puts trust in news in Britain at 30%, down five points in a year, while AI and industrial-scale disinformation have made it harder for the public to discern truth from fiction. A democracy runs on trust, and trust in Britain is already teetering under immense strain. It cannot afford to lose one of the few instruments that still earns it.

Polling belongs in the same conversation as lobbying, donations, and the revolving door between business and politics because while, when done ethically, each can positively contribute to society, they can also exert political influence while obscuring who is doing the influencing.

In July, the Ethics and Integrity Commission recommended a register of all lobbying activity, on the principle that influence should be visible to the people who will bear the brunt of its effects. Polling should be held to the same principle.

Transparency leaves every party free to make its case. A poll hiding its client is political advocacy with the workings concealed, and if polling is to keep the authority it has borrowed from the public, the public must be allowed to see who is doing the borrowing.