While polling can give us an idea of what the public thinks, there is nothing like real votes to test the mood of the country. With elections across large areas of England, plus Scotland and Wales tomorrow, we’ll finally get some real votes to compare recent polling against. While the results in Scotland and Wales will be roughly in line with party vote shares, as they use voting systems that reflect how people vote, local council elections in England are a different story.

England’s First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system is likely to deliver numerous highly disproportional results, with parties possibly taking control of councils where they didn’t win the most votes and councillors elected on tiny vote shares. First Past the Post simply cannot cope with this new reality of multi-party politics.

As can be seen below, we have hit another milestone in terms of electoral fragmentation, with no fewer than five parties separated by just 14.2 percentage points in our April polling averages data – a new record.

Scroll down to see the polling for April 2026

First Past The Post is designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to splutter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted. We will be watching closely as the English local elections results come in and will report back on what happens.

Two sets of numbers to keep an eye on in the aftermath of the English local elections are the Projected National Share (PNS) produced by Professor Sir John Curtice, for the BBC and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher, for Sky News.

Both the PNS and the NEV have been published every year for around the last 45 years. What these data attempt to do, via slightly different methodologies, is to estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole country, rather than just in certain parts of it. This makes it possible to compare local elections vote shares from one year to the next, even though the types of places where English local elections take place varies significantly from one year to the next.

In May 2025, the PNS recorded five parties on over 10% of the vote for the first time and placed those five parties within 19 percentage points of each other. This year we expect to see both the PNS and NEV reflect an even more fragmented political landscape, in line with how the opinion polls have moved over the last year.

April UK General Election Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent April poll by each of the ten polling companies who published a UK general election poll during April, is as follows:

* Compared with March’s average – Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

What do these mean?

• The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters.
• There is only a 14.2-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data.
• The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.7%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.
• Reform UK’s vote share (26.4%) represents its lowest monthly average vote share in the last 12 months, since they recorded 24.9% in April 2025. They are down 5.4 points from their monthly average vote share peak, which was 31.8% in September 2025.

April’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Freshwater Strategy; Good Growth Foundation; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Techne; YouGov.

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With growing fragmentation, it becomes harder and harder to work out how polling will translate into seats in Westminster, at UK general elections. Something that pollsters have tried to get round with MRP polls. These MRP polls take data from a bigger than normal sample of people. For example, the sample for YouGov’s most recent UK general election MRP was 13,000. YouGov’s MRP model  looks for relationships between people’s characteristics and how they intend to vote. It then combines these relationships with information about the characteristics of people living in different constituencies, in order to produce estimates of voting intention in each constituency.

Both YouGov and More In Common have published MRP polls for this week’s London local elections. However, both companies have stuck to estimating vote shares for each party, in each London borough, rather than attempting to estimate the number of council seats each party will get in each borough. This highlights just how difficult it is becoming to understand how party vote shares will translate into representation in elected chambers, under FPTP.

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Since February 2025, we at the Electoral Reform Society have been collecting data on UK general election voting intention polls published by British Polling Council (BPC) members.

The year since has seen the continuation of a trend decades in the making but which has now reached unprecedented levels: the breakdown of the UK’s post-war two-party political system and its replacement with a multi-party system, which is the norm throughout Europe.

Unfortunately, unlike in the rest of Europe, we have a voting system – First Past the Post – designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to sputter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted.

To see evidence of the extent to which the UK is becoming a multi-party nation, let’s turn our attention to the polling data for March 2026. This month saw a bumper crop of polls from BPC members. Twelve different companies published polls, a monthly high since the ERS started collecting this data a year ago.

March UK Polling Averages

The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent March poll by each of those twelve companies, is as follows:

* Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change

The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters. There is only a 15-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data. The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.1%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.

The Green Party’s vote share represents its highest monthly average vote share since the party’s formation. Indeed, this week’s YouGov poll had the Greens in joint 2^nd place, behind Reform UK.

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First Past the Post: A system under strain

The days of a vast majority of people voting for one of two ‘major parties’ are gone. Unfortunately, the electoral system designed for those days, First Past The Post (FPTP), is still very much with us for UK general elections.

First Past the Post resulted in the most disproportional general election result ever in 2024, when Labour won almost two-thirds of seats, from just over one-third of votes. With the continued rise of multi-party politics since then, it is likely to result in even more random and chaotic results in future.

This outdated system simply cannot cope with how people are expressing their democratic preferences in 2026. We are seeing increasing numbers of MPs and councillors elected with under one-third of votes, meaning the views of over two-thirds of voters are simply ignored.

In addition, First Past the Post often causes voters to feel under pressure to vote ‘tactically’, where they have to consider voting for a party that is not their favourite, to try to stop a party they really dislike from winning. This is not how democracy should work but there is a real danger that our next general election will be dominated by tactical discussions of who people should vote for to keep out other parties, rather than a debate about competing visions for the country.

Now is the time to make the case for change

We need a new proportional voting system, one that reflects the new realities of multi-party politics in the UK and which would mean people could express the genuine democratic preferences without having to worry about tactical considerations.

The Representation of the People Bill is currently making its way through parliament. This bill includes several important changes we’ve long campaigned for – this is real progress. But there is a huge missing piece.

If this Bill is going to live up to its name, it must replace the outdated First Past the Post system with a proportional one – where seats in Parliament actually reflect how people vote.

March’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Focaldata; Freshwater Strategy; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Survation; Techne; Verian; YouGov.

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Where elections often used to be a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives, voters are now spreading their support across an increasingly crowded field – and our voting system is struggling to keep up.

The latest polling data, including a striking new YouGov survey and a roundup of recent polling from eight major polling firms, paints a vivid picture of a country whose political allegiances have shifted dramatically. The question is no longer whether multi-party politics has arrived in the UK – it’s whether our outdated electoral system can survive it.

YouGov showing a snapshot of a fragmented electorate

A voting intention poll published by YouGov this week (fieldwork: 1-2 March), produced findings that shine a light on the multi-party politics that now exists in the UK.

Here are some of those data:

• The party with the highest level of support (Reform UK) on just 23% (fewer than a quarter of voters).
• Five parties within just nine percentage points of each other (the Liberal Democrats were in 5th place, on 14%).
• Neither of the traditional ‘big two’ parties of British politics (Labour and the Conservatives) in the top two positions (the Greens were in 2nd place, on 21%).

This was a Great Britain-wide poll but recent polling in Scotland and Wales show two other parties (the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru) as the best supported parties in each of those countries.

This week’s YouGov poll is just one poll and like any poll in isolation should be treated with caution. However, we at the Electoral Reform Society monitor opinion polling on an ongoing basis and the broad themes of the YouGov poll are in line with what we have seen from other polling.

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If there were a general election tomorrow, who would form the next government? It sounds like a simple question if you have access to the latest polls. But when the latest YouGov poll, released on 28 October, shows Reform UK on 27%, Labour and the Conservatives tied on 17% each, the Greens on 16%, Liberal Democrats on 15%, and the SNP on 3%, it’s anything but.

It’s a striking poll for a few reasons, the old duopoly of Labour and the conservatives have a combined vote share of 34%, a massive collapse from 2017, when over 80 percent of votes went to those two parties (the highest combined vote share since 1970). The Greens have their highest poll share ever on 16% and four parties sit within three percentage points from each other.

We live in a multi-party Britain. But under Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system, it’s impossible to tell what Parliament would actually look like from this poll.

Yet voters are supposed to decide who to vote for based on polls like this. Without a fancy statistical model or a degree in psephology, you’d just be guessing.

The guessing game of First Past the Post

It shouldn’t take an expert to translate public opinion into seats. But the brutal truth is that in our system, votes don’t add up to representation, they get filtered, distorted and wasted along the way.

With Reform UK on just over a quarter of the vote, they will probably get the most MPs, but who knows if that means they will be in government alone? Who knows how many seats the other parties will get. That’s not stability. That’s chaos wrapped up as tradition.

Predictability starts with fairness

A few data scientists have tried to predict what this poll would mean. The clever guys at electionmaps.uk have done a seat projection which shows Reform UK on 324 seats – just under half of the 650 MPs and the Liberal Democrats as the official opposition – as the 5^th most popular party.

 

Party	YouGov Poll	Elections Maps Projection (MPs)
Reform UK	27%	49.8% (324)
Labour	17%	11.4% (74)
Conservative	17%	5.8% (38)
Green	16%	6.5% (42)
Liberal Democrats	15%	13.5% (88)
SNP	3%	7% (46)

From just 3% of the vote UK wide, the SNP leapfrog both the Conservatives and Greens, who are each five times as popular.

We should be able to look at a poll and have a reasonable sense of how the country’s votes would translate into seats. Parties that gain votes should gain seats, while those that lose them should lose influence. In a proportional system, we could. Votes would count equally, and Parliament would mirror the people.

We’d have a politics built on collaboration, not confusion. On stability, not spin.

When voters move left, the system lurches right

How can we hold parties to account when the system doesn’t respond? Look at what’s happening to Labour now. The party is losing voters to its left, to the Greens, to smaller progressive parties, to those who want bolder climate action and more equal economics. In a healthy democracy, that would be a clear signal: Labour’s voters wants a more progressive direction.

But under First Past the Post, those shifts don’t pull politics leftward, they tilt it the other way. Split votes on the left hand more seats to the right. The system punishes diversity of opinion and rewards tactical silence.

What really brings stability

Some say we need First Past the Post to create majority governments in order to bring stability. But recent history tells a different story.

After the 2019 election, the Conservatives won a big majority in Parliament, but not among voters. That mismatch between seats and support led to years of turmoil, three Prime Ministers, and a sense of drift that never really ended.

And since 2024, Labour’s turn in office has shown that a parliamentary landslide built on a minority of votes doesn’t deliver direction either. Without broad backing, governments struggle to lead with confidence or legitimacy, constantly worrying about the slim margins that brought them victory.

Supporters of the status quo point to events happening under First Past the Post and proclaim that only First Past the Post can save us from more of the same. But real stability doesn’t come from catapulting one party into power. It comes from a government that actually reflects the majority of people.

Time for proportional representation

Britain deserves an electoral system that treats voters with respect. One where the link between votes and power is clear, and where stability comes from shared purpose, not artificial majorities.

It’s time we stopped guessing. It’s time for Proportional Representation, so our politics can finally reflect the people.

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