Voters want government to prioritise public services over balancing books, analysis suggests

Ahead of the government’s first Budget, potential changes to borrowing and taxes to fund public services are popular with voters, according to the research, which combined polling with randomised message testing.

According to the analysis, tangible progress on public services is rewarded even if it comes with unpopular trade-offs such as higher debt, while failure to improve public services is punished even if it comes with popular upsides (for example, debt or deficit falling).

If the government reduces debt and deficits but NHS waiting lists are unchanged, it will be much less popular among people who switched from another party to vote for Labour in the last election, according to the research. This scenario resulted in an approval rating of -12 – a decrease of 28 percentage points on current ratings.

Scenarios were tested via a randomised control trial, in which a large sample of voters were split into six groups and exposed to different messages. The RCT found that most of Labour’s proposed policy measures were resilient to attack.

Harry Quilter-Pinner, IPPR interim executive director, said: "Voters support the higher investment needed in infrastructure and public services to fix broken Britain – even if this means higher borrowing and taxes. They want the government to be changemakers, not just bookkeepers."

Steve Akehurst, director of Persuasion UK, said: "It’s clear from this research that voters will not reward Labour simply for being good stewards of the economy. The public wants to see tangible improvements in essential services. Key parts of Labour’s coalition do not necessarily like the idea of higher borrowing or tax, but they seem willing to forgive it as the price of improved services."

Methodology
Persuasion UK designed polling and message-testing in collaboration with IPPR, with fieldwork conducted by YouGov in September and October 2024.

The research involved: a baseline survey of 4,000 UK voters; a randomised control trial (RCT) message testing experiment with 6,000 voters; one split-sample experiment looking at ‘policy accumulation’, with 12,000 voters; an experiment testing different scenarios on government approval ratings, with 6,400 voters. Samples were weighted to be nationally representative.