Pollster Says There Is "Systematic" Bias In UK Election Polling Which Overstates Labour

The co-founder of a leading polling company has said that there is "systematic" bias across the polling industry that led to the Labour Party being overstated in the run-up to the 2024 General Election, as well as in previous elections.

Martin Boon, Co-founder and Managing Director at polling company Deltapoll, joined Professor Will Jennings and Conservative peer and commentator Lord Robert Hayward on Wednesday at an event in Parliament to reflect on the 2024 General Election polling.

According to Jennings, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Southampton, the election on 4 July was "not a great night" for UK pollsters.

He pointed to the fact that the polling over-estimation of support for Labour in 2024 was the highest on record and the overall polling error of the margin between the Conservative Party and Labour was the worst since the 1992 election – when Neil Kinnock's Labour was widely expected to win but ended up losing to John Major's Conservatives.

Keir Starmer's Labour party won 33.7 per cent of the vote in July, ten per cent ahead of the Tories. This was enough to deliver a huge Labour majority in the First Past The Post electoral system. However, polls published in the days leading up to the election put Labour close to 40 per cent of the vote, and with a significantly larger lead over the Conservatives.

Boon admitted that the evidence pointed to not just a one-off error across polling, but "systematic" bias across polling in the UK and also in other countries.

"Back in 2019 in Australia, the Australian Labor Party (a centre-left party) was predicted to win, not just by all of the final polls, but every single poll that was conducted a year out of the election bar one," he said.

"But