Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
UK Local Elections 2026
3AUG

Reform plateau breaks after five weeks

1 min read
15:31UTC

YouGov's five-week Reform plateau broke in mid-July, with the Conservatives and Labour tied at 19% and the Greens up to 15%.

PoliticsDeveloping
Key takeaway

YouGov's Reform plateau broke, leaving the Conservatives and Labour tied at 19%.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

For five weeks, opinion polls had barely moved: Reform UK sitting comfortably ahead of everyone else. That finally changed in YouGov's poll taken 12-13 July. Reform dropped slightly to 24%, while the Conservatives and Labour are now tied at 19% each, and the Greens jumped two points to 15%, their biggest single move of the whole parliament so far.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

YouGov's own fieldwork notes flag the 12-13 July poll as its first conducted after Burnham's confirmation as Labour leader was locked in, rather than merely rumoured, the most likely proximate trigger for movement after five weeks of an unchanged Reform lead.

The two-point jump for the Greens, their fastest movement of the parliament, coincides with the same fieldwork window, suggesting some of the shift is undecided or soft Labour-considering voters moving to a clearer alternative rather than direct Reform-to-Green switching, though YouGov's topline does not publish internal transfer data.

First Reported In

Update #12 · The finance bill Reform outran is back

YouGov· 15 Jul 2026
Read original
Different Perspectives
Democratic Unionist Party
Democratic Unionist Party
Gavin Robinson rejects Sinn Féin's characterisation of the institutions as precarious, says the DUP is "committed to" delivering for the public, and will not be "goaded" into a dispute he attributes to Treasury funding rather than unionist bad faith.
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin
Conor Murphy says Stormont power-sharing is in "a precarious place" and blames the DUP for lacking "the political will to make it work", while insisting his own party remains "wedded to power-sharing".
Council leaders in West Sussex and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
Council leaders in West Sussex and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
Officers must recruit staff and set shadow budgets through the autumn for boundaries Whitehall has not yet drawn, after October's deferral cost three months of planning time without settling anything, while their May 2027 election date has not moved.
Restore Britain
Restore Britain
Restore Britain beat the Conservatives into fifth place in its first mayoral attempt, evidence Rupert Lowe's party has already displaced the Tories as the default home for voters leaving the Conservative column on Reform's right flank.
Scottish National Party
Scottish National Party
The SNP, through deputy leader Keith Brown, calls Sarwar's peerage exit "the most undemocratic trick in the Westminster book", arguing Scottish Labour now runs on a caretaker leader chosen by patronage rather than by Scottish voters.
Conservative Party
Conservative Party
The Conservatives finished fifth in Greater Manchester, beaten by Restore Britain, a party founded this year, in a contest the Tories once treated as a two-horse race against Labour.