How to balance sustainability, fairness and protecting the vulnerable: Reform have made welfare one of their main pre-conference arguments. Their diagnosis resonates across their voter base, but Reform voters split on the cure.
Results week: Britons are divided on whether exams have got easier, but most think life has got harder for the young people sitting them.
Does looking at the eclipse correlate with wanting institutions to “burn down”? We had two odd collective experiences last week - a solar eclipse and an emergency alert. What do they tell us about Britons’ worldviews?
How to balance welfare sustainability and fairness while protecting the vulnerable
Reform UK started the week setting out a detailed set of policies on welfare, publishing their "Making Welfare Work" plan. From a public opinion perspective, Reform is channelling a concern shared widely among the public that the welfare bill is unsustainable and action needs to be taken to get it down and get people into work.
Beyond public spending, welfare policy matters to voters on a fairness level too - and for many on the right it shapes their view of a broken social contract. A perception that you can be “better off not working”, while the cost of living crisis squeezes working people, is often cited in focus groups as evidence that contribution is no longer rewarded.
More than two in three Britons (68 per cent) say people on benefits should always receive less than those in full-time work - a view held by 61 per cent of 2024 Labour voters and even 59 per cent of Green voters - but it rises to 78 per cent of Reform voters and 83 per cent of Conservatives.
You can take the ‘great’ out of Britain at the moment. We're giving the money away, left, right, and centre. Doesn't matter whether it's to illegal immigration, whether or not it's to benefits. We just seem to be a deep pocket and it's all going out and nothing's coming in. I mean, I'm of an age now where I should be getting my pension, and it's been put back now till I'm 67. I mean, when I started work at 15, I was told that I was going to get my pension at 60, come hell or high water. And I worked my butt off for 45 years to make sure that I got my money, only to be told you can’t have it (...) They keep moving the goalposts, and then the money goes to something else.
Lucinda, retired foster carer, Newport
I'm a teacher. My husband's got a well-paid job. I now have to work a second job to be able to pay the bills whilst people don't even have to worry about working and making ends meet. It's always the people on benefits that get given support. It's never the working people…our country just doesn't seem to look after the people that are funding all of this, the people that are going out to work, and then we get resentful of it.
Jodi, teacher, Newport
Sometimes I'm cremating until 11 o'clock at night but I'm lucky if I get any sort of treat for myself fortnightly, maybe monthly (...) I've worked since I was 15. So yeah, I get mad and irate looking at people (on benefits) that are going abroad two and three times a year and I couldn't afford to go abroad once a year.
This view isn’t just shared by Reform voters, voters overall think that benefits and welfare payments are unsustainable, though they are more split on pensions. But Reform voters do feel this most acutely of all the main party voter groups.
But Reform’s voter base is not a monolith. Last year, our deep dive report into Reform voters found that while Reform voters are remarkably united in their concern about migration and a sense that the country is going in the wrong direction, they diverge on economic issues - including welfare spending. Conservative-to-Reform switchers agree overwhelmingly that benefits are too readily available to people who do not contribute, while Labour-to-Reform switchers are more divided, and are concerned about the need for a robust safety net.
We watched that dynamic play out last year. Among Reform's own supporters, Labour's proposed PIP cuts were the rare policy that landed at just over net zero approval, with Reform voters split almost down the middle: 42 per cent supported the cuts, 40 per cent opposed them.
And when we asked Labour-Reform switchers why they had turned away from the Labour Party, 32 per cent cited ‘failures to protect the vulnerable’. In focus groups, these voters would sometimes cite the welfare reforms alongside means-testing the Winter Fuel Allowance as evidence that the government’s priorities were in the wrong place, or that it was targeting the most vulnerable.
PIP being reduced, universal credit being reduced, child benefit being reduced, winter fuel being taken off pensioners, all of those things I wouldn't imagine a Labour party would be supporting (...) we seem to be taking money from the very poorest in society and that's not the Labour Party that I liked and would support.
Mark, retired, Burnley, Labour to Reform switcher
It’s also the case that voters don’t just want to see a stick when it comes to welfare reform, particularly getting young people back into work. While voters do express some support for imposing greater conditionality and restricting benefits for those that can work and don't take up opportunities, they also think faster access to mental health treatment is the best way to get young people with mental health conditions into work.
So does this week's move make sense for Reform's base? At a top level, most of the measures will be popular: Reform voters overwhelmingly support measures to restrict foreign nationals’ ability to claim benefits, and to tighten eligibility in general. But Reform must also pass a compassion test, particularly on issues around child poverty, and a practicality and fairness test on issues such as EU citizens in the UK, in order to keep their economic coalition together.
And more broadly, Reform’s shift to the right on the economy makes sense if they can supplant the Conservatives as the main party on the right. But the Conservative vote share has stabilised in recent years and if Reform are to reach beyond the traditional right, they will need to offer something substantially different from the Conservatives. A position that feels too close to the Tories on the economy could leave Reform’s left flank exposed to the Burnham bounce.
You can hear us discussing Reform’s welfare dilemma in the podcast this week:
GCSE results arrived yesterday with an uptick in the numbers achieving grades 7 to 9, a week after A-levels delivered the highest rate of top grades outside the Covid years. We polled the public on the annual argument about whether it has become too easy to get top grades.
Overall, Britons lean towards saying the balance is about right (30 per cent) or that top grades are too easy to achieve (26 per cent), with 16 per cent saying it is too hard. But the age gradient stands out.
Every age group under 45 is more likely to say top grades are too hard than too easy, rising to 30 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds, though even here a plurality say “about right”. Every age group over 45 leans the other way: among those aged 65 to 74, 36 per cent say “too easy” compared to just 7 per cent “too hard”. However, parents of secondary school children stand out for saying it is too hard - perhaps because they have spent much of the spring and summer with children revising at home!
A third of Britons (34 per cent) think exams are generally easier than when they were at school - a view held by every generation, but that peaks among Baby Boomers, who say by 40 per cent to 11 per cent that exams are easier.
And with Lucy Powell reopening the debate about compulsory resits for English and maths, our research finds that the public would actually support going further in ensuring that students stick with these subjects. Around 6 in 10 Britons say English (62 per cent) and maths (57 per cent) should be made mandatory for people to study until 18.
But beyond exams themselves, we found that over half the public (55 per cent) think it is harder to be a young person today than when they were 18 - just over 1 in 10 (13 per cent) think it is easier, while a quarter say it is neither easier nor harder.
There is cross-party consensus on this. Reform voters are the least likely, but still 54 per cent say it is harder being a young person today and only 21 per cent say it is easier.
Interestingly, Gen Z and Baby Boomers are the most likely to think it is now harder being a young person than when they were 18. At least 6 in 10 of both groups say so compared to 51 per cent of Millennials.
In focus groups, Britons often bring up a sense of concern for the next generation, who are growing up online and facing a difficult job and housing market. It’s why we often see strikingly high support across politics for a ban on social media for under 16s, for greater vocational opportunities and for measures to improve the housing market. As we’ve discussed before, the sense that the next generation can no longer expect a better quality of life than their parents is a key driver of ‘Broken Britain’.
Do those who looked directly at the eclipse want to let our institutions burn?
We had two nationwide experiences last week: a solar eclipse and the government's emergency alert going off on phones across England and Wales. In a more atomised world, collective experiences are rare enough that they are always worth polling and these were no exception.
Starting with Friday’s emergency alert. We had another stark reminder that X/Twitter is not Britain. Despite grumbles on social media, Britons tended to think the alert was necessary, by 51 per cent to 39 per cent. Labour voters say so overwhelmingly (70 per cent to 25 per cent), as do Liberal Democrats, Greens and Conservatives. Reform voters are the only group to say it was not necessary, by 51 per cent to 42 per cent.
Most people plan to leave the alert switched on: 71 per cent say they would not turn it off, compared to 23 per cent who would and 6 per cent who already have. Younger Britons are the most likely to want rid of it - 31 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds would turn it off, compared with 8 per cent of over-75s.
Now to the eclipse. Among the 54 per cent of Britons who say they watched the eclipse, a quarter (25 per cent) wore protective glasses, 16 per cent used a colander or pinhole projector, 16 per cent looked through their phone, and 16 per cent - ignoring official advice - looked directly at it. Reform voters were the most likely to have done so, at 18 per cent, and Conservative voters the least, at 11 per cent.
How does going against advice on watching the eclipse correlate with anti-system thinking in general?
We often ask Britons to place themselves on a scale from "our political and social institutions are worth preserving and improving, not destroying" to "when I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking just let them all burn". It's a good measure of Britons’ appetite for radical change and institutional trust.
A pattern does emerge - among those who looked directly at the sun, 56 per cent sit on the burn-it-down half of that scale. Among those who wore protective glasses, this drops to 38 per cent.
No surprise, then, that Dissenting Disruptors - the most anti-system of our Seven Segments - were by far the most likely to have looked directly at the sun, at 25 per cent. Traditional Conservatives, at 9 per cent, were the least likely (and joint most likely to have found themselves a colander).
Our report on Trust in Science with Wellcome looks in detail at the factors that make people more or less likely to trust official advice. While all segments have net-positive trust in science, those whose trust is lower, including Dissenting Disruptors, told us about how the pandemic had eroded their confidence, with a small minority of Britons actively pushing back on institutions by disregarding or defying official advice.
I just think since COVID, I don't know about anyone else, but I just lost all trust. Don't watch the news. Do the opposite of what the government says. Basically. I just completely cannot believe the levels that they went to. The goalposts continually moved.
Tom, mechanical design engineer, Great Yarmouth
You can hear us discussing Reform's welfare push, the eclipse and whether high turnout is really a sign of a healthy democracy in this week's episode of The Opinion Brief Podcast:
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