Election Opinion Poll Inquiry Task Force Named

The British Polling Council (BPC), supported by the MRS, has named the members of its 'task force' who will oversee an independent inquiry examining how UK pollsters underestimated the Conservative lead over Labour during the run-up to the recent general election.

Of the final eleven polls conducted, ten suggested that Labour and the Tories were neck-and-neck, which would have resulted in a hung parliament. By contrast, the BBC exit poll published at 10pm on election day predicted that the Tories would get 316 seats and Labour 239, which proved far more accurate - the final outcome delivered 331 seats to the Tories and 232 to Labour.

The inquiry, which was announced the day after the election, will be led by Professor Patrick Sturgis (pictured), Director of the National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton. Under his chairmanship, his team will aim to establish the degree of inaccuracy in the polls, the reasons for the inaccuracies identified, and whether the findings and conduct of the polls were adequately communicated to the general public. Due to report by 1st March next year, the inquiry will seek and welcomes submissions from all interested parties, and is empowered both to make recommendations about the future practice of polling and, where appropriate, for changes in the rules of the BPC.

Eight professionals who were not directly involved in conducting published polls during the election campaign have agreed to serve as unpaid members of the inquiry:

• Nick Baker, Group CEO, Quadrangle Research Group
• Mario Callegaro, Senior Survey Research Scientist, Google UK
• Stephen Fisher, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, University of Oxford, who runs the Electionsetc web site
• Jouni Kuha, Associate Professor of Statistics, LSE and lead statistician for the BBC/ITV/Sky exit poll
• Jane Green, Professor of Political Science, University of Manchester and Co-Director of the 2015 British Election Study
• Will Jennings, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Southampton, and a member of the Polling Observatory team
• Ben Lauderdale, Associate Professor in Research Methodology, London School of Economics, and one of the team behind the electionforecast.co.uk web site
• Patten Smith, Research Director, Research Methods Centre, Ipsos MORI and Chair of the Social Research Association

Professor John Curtice, President of the BPC, comments: 'The polls clearly gave the public a misleading impression of the likely outcome of the 2015 election and this shaped the reporting of the campaign. The council is committed to ensuring that there should be a thorough and transparent investigation into what apparently went wrong, and how both the conduct and the reporting of the polls might be improved in future.'

Information about the work of the inquiry will be available via a web site launched today at: www.ncrm.ac.uk/polling . A public meeting will be held during the afternoon of 19 June at the Royal Statistical Society, London, and registration will open, via the NCRM web site, on Tuesday 26th May.