A recent Opinium poll carried by the website Guido Fawkes which highlighted Londoners would rather have an entrepreneur than an ex-minister as mayor did not state the poll was commissioned by London mayoral hopeful Festus Akinbusoye. While this information was included in an Evening Standard write-up of the poll, it was only published belatedly by Opinium.
A spokesperson for Opinium said: “We take our responsibilities as a member of the British Polling Council seriously and are committed to meeting the requirements that apply when polling enters the public domain.”
They added they had rectified the way the tables were labeled, which they said was due to an “administrative oversight.”
In another case in January 2023, the Liberal Democrats commissioned Savanta to ask voters who was responsible for the problems the country faces. The respondents were asked to choose between three named Conservative prime ministers, the Conservative Party itself, and the COVID pandemic and the Ukraine war, with no other answers available.
The poll was private until some of its results were briefed to the Observer newspaper, which brought it under the British Polling Council’s transparency rules. Despite this, Savanta did not upload the full tables — confirming the client, sample size and details of the questions and answers — until POLITICO contacted the firm this week.
A Savanta spokesperson said the failure to upload the tables was “an oversight on our part.”
Transparency campaigners have said it is time that polling firms were held to tougher standards.
Tim Picton from the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption said: “These alarming revelations suggest that this is a long-standing issue that goes beyond just one polling company. It is vital that the British Polling Council now investigates these cases and assesses if there is a wider culture of polling companies working hand in glove with political parties while not declaring the relationship.”