A new British politics website has launched, bringing together opinion polls, election results, and profiles of all 650 Westminster MPs, along with interactive tools to follow UK elections.
UK Decides aims to make political information easier to find and understand, whether visitors want to check the latest voting intention figures, look up their local MP or see how closely contested their constituency was at the last general election.
The independent website brings together information from polling companies, Parliament and official election results, much of which is currently spread across different sources.
One of its main features is a Poll of Polls, which combines voting intention surveys from leading British pollsters to show how support for the main political parties is changing.
Rather than simply averaging every published survey, UK Decides takes the latest qualifying poll from each polling company within a rolling 30-day period, giving each organisation equal weight.
This means pollsters publishing several surveys a week do not influence the overall average more than those publishing less frequently.
Readers can also inspect the individual polls, including fieldwork dates, sample sizes and links to the original data.
Making sense of British politics
David Townsend, spokesperson for UK Decides, said:
“We wanted to build something that we’d find useful ourselves. There’s no shortage of political news or opinion, but if you want to compare polls, check an election result or find out more about your MP, you can end up looking across half a dozen different websites.
“UK Decides brings that information together in one place. We’re not trying to tell people what to think or who to vote for. We want to make it easier for them to look at the figures, understand what they mean and draw their own conclusions.”
Beyond national polling figures, the site has dedicated pages for every Westminster constituency and sitting MP, bringing together election results, biographical information and relevant news coverage.
An interactive swingometer lets visitors explore changes in party support, while a constituency marginality explorer identifies the seats decided by the narrowest margins in the 2024 general election.
The website also features published MRP constituency forecasts and guides explaining how opinion polls are conducted, why different polling companies sometimes produce conflicting results and how forecasts of parliamentary seats are produced.
Townsend added:
“One thing we wanted to get right was transparency. If we publish a polling average, readers should be able to see which polls went into it and how we calculated it.
“The same goes for election projections. Polls, forecasts and actual election results are three different things, and we think it’s important to make those distinctions clear.”
The launch comes as Britain’s traditional two-party political landscape faces growing competition from smaller parties, making national polling averages and constituency-level voting patterns increasingly interesting to follow.
The site is free to access, has no political party affiliation and will be updated as new polling figures, election results and parliamentary information become available.
Leave a Comment