Immigration was seen by 58 percent of people in the UK as one of the top three issues facing the country in September 2025. The economy was the second-most important issue for voters this month, ahead of health as a distant third. These three issues have consistently been identified as the most important issues for voters. Labour's popularity continues to sink in 2025 Despite winning the 2024 general election with a strong majority, the new Labour government has had its share of struggles since coming to power. Shortly after taking office, the approval rating for Labour stood at -2 percent, but this fell throughout the second half of 2024, and by January 2025 had sunk to a new low of -47 percent. Although this was still higher than the previous government's last approval rating of -56 percent, it is nevertheless a severe review from the electorate. Among several decisions from the government, arguably the least popular was the government withdrawing winter fuel payments. This state benefit, previously paid to all pensioners, is now only paid to those on low incomes, with millions of pensioners not receiving this payment in winter 2024. Sunak's pledges fail to prevent defeat in 2024 With an election on the horizon, and the Labour Party consistently ahead in the polls, addressing voter concerns directly was one of the best chances the Conservatives had of staying in power in 2023. At the start of that year, Rishi Sunak attempted to do this by setting out his five pledges for the next twelve months; halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce national debt, cut NHS waiting times, and stop small boats. A year later, Sunak had at best only partial success in these aims. Although the inflation rate fell, economic growth was weak and even declined in the last two quarters of 2023, although it did return to growth in early 2024. National debt was only expected to fall in the mid to late 2020s, while the trend of increasing NHS waiting times did not reverse. Small boat crossings were down from 2022, but still higher than in 2021 or 2020. .

As of July 2025, the economy was seen as the most important issue facing the UK according to young voters (aged between 18 and 24). Compared with the overall population, housing and health were seen as more important issues than immigration, which was the joint-second most important issue for the general population.

Graph and download economic data for New Capital Issues for Great Britain (M10022GBM431NNBR) from Jan 1917 to Jul 1939 about issues, capital, United Kingdom, and new.

This statistic shows the opinion of British adults of the most important issues facing the United Kingdom (UK) in January 2015. Immigration and asylum were considered as important as the economy - both on ** percent - followed by health and welfare benefits.

Indicators from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) of what people report are the most important issues facing the UK. Uses longer data collection periods to allow estimates from various personal characteristics.

Background
The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series began in 1983. The series is designed to produce annual measures of attitudinal movements to complement large-scale government surveys that deal largely with facts and behaviour patterns, and the data on party political attitudes produced by opinion polls. One of the BSA's main purposes is to allow the monitoring of patterns of continuity and change, and the examination of the relative rates at which attitudes, in respect of a range of social issues, change over time. Some questions are asked regularly, others less often. Funding for BSA comes from a number of sources (including government departments, the Economic and Social Research Council and other research foundations), but the final responsibility for the coverage and wording of the annual questionnaires rests with NatCen Social Research (formerly Social and Community Planning Research). The BSA has been conducted every year since 1983, except in 1988 and 1992 when core funding was devoted to the British Election Study (BES).

Further information about the series and links to publications may be found on the NatCen Social Research British Social Attitudes webpage.

Background

The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series began in 1983. The series is designed to produce annual measures of attitudinal movements which will complement large-scale government surveys such as the General Lifestyle Survey and the Labour Force Survey, which deal largely with facts and behaviour patterns, as well as the data on party political attitudes produced by the polls. One of the BSA's main purposes is to allow the monitoring of patterns of continuity and change, and the examination of the relative rates at which attitudes, in respect of a range of social issues, change over time. Some questions are asked regularly, others less often.

Further information about the series and links to publications may be found on the NatCen Social Research British Social Attitudes website.

BSA 2023

Since 2020 BSA has operated with a push-to-web design, with telephone opt-in to cover the offline population.

The BSA 2023 report, including Key Findings, is available from the NatCen BSA website.

MAIN TOPICS

Each year the interview questionnaire contains a number of 'core' questions, which are repeated in most years. In addition, a wide range of background and classificatory questions is included. The remainder of the questionnaire is devoted to a series of questions (modules) on a range of social, economic, political and moral issues - some asked regularly, others less often. Cross-indexes of those questions asked more than once appear in the reports.

In 2023 the questionnaire included the following topics: Household Composition,

Employment, Politics, Benefits and Income, National Identity and Ethnicity, Religion, Disability, Education, Changing Identities, Role of the Government, Pensions & Retirement, Poverty, Fraud & Error, Social Class, Satisfaction with Health and Care Services, Health and Care Spending, NHS Priorities and Principles, Devolution, Electoral Voting Reform, European Union, Immigration, Equal Opportunities, Climate Change and the Environment, Housing, Building New Homes.

This statistics shows the most important issues facing Great Britain according to an opinion poll among British adults in Great Britain during June of 2017. Of the respondents, ** percent reported they believed Britain leaving the EU (Brexit) to be the greatest issue their country was faced. National defense and security issues were a cause for concern to ** percent of respondents, while ** percent of respondents believed the current state of the healthcare system to be worrisome. Furthermore, issues concerning immigration and asylum policies were viewed as most important by ** percent of respondents.

Abstract (en): This survey is part of a continuing series designed to monitor trends in a wide range of social attitudes in Great Britain. The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) is similar to the General Social Survey carried out by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in the United States. The BSA questionnaire has two parts, one administered by an interviewer and the other completed by the respondent. The 1993 self-enumerated questionnaire was devoted to a series of questions on a range of social, economic, political, and moral issues. Topics covered (by section) are: (1) government spending, the National Health Service, (2) labor market participation, the workplace, redundancy, employee decision-making, (3) AIDS, the countryside, (4) primary and secondary school education, transportation, the environment, (5) Northern Ireland, the European Community, (6) charitable giving, economic issues and policies (including income and taxation), (7) illegal drugs, social security benefits, child maintenance, (8) sexual relations, (9) housing, (10) religious denomination and attendance, and (11) ethnic origin. Beginning in 1985, an international initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), also contributed a module to the BSA. The topic of the ISSP module in this collection was the environment. Additional demographic data included age, education, income, marital status, and religious and political affiliations. All adults aged 18 or over living in private households in Britain whose addresses were included in the electoral registers (excluding the "crofting counties" north of the Caledonian Canal). Multistage stratified random sample consisting of four stages. From 1993 the sample was drawn from the Postcode Address File, whereas in previous years it had been drawn from the electoral register. 2005-07-22 The data and documentation were resupplied by the United Kingdom Data Archive (UKDA). The data are now available as an SPSS portable file and the documentation has been converted to PDF by the UKDA. Funding insitution(s): Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts (Great Britain). Nuffield Foundation (United Kingdom). Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom). Department of Employment. Department of Health (United Kingdom). Home Office (United Kingdom). Department of Social Security (United Kingdom). Department of Education. Scottish Office Education Department. Countryside Commission (Great Britain). Charities Aid Foundation (United Kingdom). European Commission. face-to-face interview, computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI), self-enumerated questionnaire (1) In 1999, Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) became the National Centre for Social Research. (2) Under agreement with the UKDA, the data are disseminated as they were received, without additional processing by ICPSR. This agreement also provides that ICPSR will disseminate the data only for use within its member institutions. Persons from nonmember institutions may request these data directly from the UKDA. (3) The data are provided as an SPSS portable file. (4) The documentation was converted to Portable Document Format (PDF) by the UKDA. The PDF documentation can also be downloaded from the UKDA Web site. (5) The formats for some variables in the SPSS portable file (e.g., REMPLOYE) are not wide enough to accommodate the missing value specifications. For some procedures SPSS will display these missing values as asterisks. Users can widen the formats to display the actual missing value codes. (6) The documentation contains information for two different studies: British Social Attitudes, 1993, and Northern Ireland Social Attitudes, 1993. However, only the British Social Attitudes dataset is provided in this collection. (7) The British Social Attitudes Survey series began in 1983 and was conducted every year since, except in 1988 and 1992 when the core funding from the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts was devoted to conducting post-election studies of political attitudes and voting behavior in the British Election Study (BES) Survey series. (8) In 1993 a split-sample experiment was carried out whereby a random half of the sample points was allocated to computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) and the rest to pencil and paper interviewing (PAPI).

The British Election Longitudinal News Study 2015–2019 (BELNS) contains campaign coverage relating to three general elections: 2015, 2017, 2019 and the 2016 EU referendum. Media included are national newspapers, local newspapers, television and radio news. The print newspaper component tracks topic and general election candidate coverage across 46 national and local sources, including actor-level sentiment in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections. The television and radio component tracks topic and general election candidate coverage across 24national and local sources, including actor-level sentiment in the 2017 and 2019 general elections and the 2016 EU referendum. For issues, the data are at the outlet-day level on topics that correspond to mii, the “SINGLE MOST important issues facing the country” asked in all waves of the British Election Study Panels 2014 to 2023 (Fieldhouse et al. 2019) as open-ended response items. The unit of analysis is the news source with repeated measures for each day during the study period, with variables corresponding to election period (GE2015, GE2017, GE2019, Brexit), and topics. For the candidate data, the unit of analysis is the candidate standing for election (or political figure during the referendum) and the variables relate to: election period (GE2015, GE2017, GE2019) or the EU Referendum in 2016, number of stories in which candidate was mentioned across all sources, as well as sentiment per source using different measures.

Background
The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series began in 1983. The series is designed to produce annual measures of attitudinal movements to complement large-scale government surveys that deal largely with facts and behaviour patterns, and the data on party political attitudes produced by opinion polls. One of the BSA's main purposes is to allow the monitoring of patterns of continuity and change, and the examination of the relative rates at which attitudes, in respect of a range of social issues, change over time. Some questions are asked regularly, others less often. Funding for BSA comes from a number of sources (including government departments, the Economic and Social Research Council and other research foundations), but the final responsibility for the coverage and wording of the annual questionnaires rests with NatCen Social Research (formerly Social and Community Planning Research). The BSA has been conducted every year since 1983, except in 1988 and 1992 when core funding was devoted to the British Election Study (BES).

Further information about the series and links to publications may be found on the NatCen Social Research British Social Attitudes webpage.

Since 2020 BSA has operated with a push-to-web design, with telephone opt-in to cover the offline population.

The latest BSA 2022 reports are available from the NatCen BSA website.

This statistic shows the results of a survey of people in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States regarding issues facing the world in 2018. Of UK respondents, ** percent thought that extremism and terrorism was a top three issue facing the word, compared with ** percent of Americans. Poverty was the most frequent answer among US respondents, with ** percent believing it to be one of the top three issues facing the world.

The British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) is the leading survey in Britain for assessing trends and changes in public opinions on social and political measures. Over the past four decades, the survey has become the main source of statistics on key national issues, which makes the survey valuable for policy making, researchers, charity and media.

The British Social Attitudes Open Teaching Dataset: Health Care and Equalities, 2021, is a subsample from the original British Social Attitudes Survey 2021 (available from the UK Data Archive under SN 9072). This open-access teaching dataset has been adapted for teaching and learning with a reduced number of variables, covering attitudes towards health care and equality.

Further information is available in the study documentation, which includes a dataset user guide.

The study was designed to investigate political change in Great Britain using a panel technique. The main areas of investigation were the party system, campaign issues, and social class. Information on the political background of the respondent as well as extensive demographic data were also collected. Semantic differential questions were also included.

Interviewing was conducted in four waves. The first wave was in 1963, the second wave followed the 1964 General Election, the third wave followed the 1966 General Election, and the fourth wave followed the 1970 General Election. This study contains fourteen overlapping samples. The 1963 wave constitutes a national cross-section sample. For 1964 and 1966 there are electorate samples. The other eleven samples are panels generated by the interviewing of respondents.

As a result of ESRC funding, this sub-series of the British Election Study has been rationalised, re-processed to the UKDA's A standard, linked to improved ICPSR documentation and had new user information created for it by the UKDA. Please see 44notes.xls and 44userguide.pdf for details.

The British Gambling Prevalence Survey is a large-scale nationally representative survey of participation in gambling and the prevalence of problem gambling in Great Britain.

The aims of the survey series are:

• measure the prevalence of participation in all forms of commercial and private gambling (including estimates of expenditure and information on venue)
• estimate the prevalence of ‘problem gambling’ and look at which activities have the highest prevalence of ‘problem gamblers’
• investigate the socio-demographic factors associated with gambling and with ‘problem gambling’
• assess attitudes towards gambling

Further information about the series can be found on the Gambling Commission's British Gambling Prevalence Surveys web pages.
British Gambling Prevalence Survey, 1999 is the first survey in the series. The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) was commissioned by GamCare to carry out the first-ever survey of the Lottery and other gambling activities in Britain. GamCare is a national charity that promotes responsible gambling and monitors the social impact of gambling. In 1999, after the National Lottery was created and a wide range of gambling activities were available, this study was designed to find out who gambles, and on what. Most people enjoy gambling, and do so within sensible limits. A small number, however, get into severe problems with their gambling. Therefore an important aspect of this survey was to examine rates of problem gambling among the British population and to assess which gambling activities cause problems and for whom.

United Kingdom Number of New Issues: UK data was reported at 9.000 Unit in Oct 2018. This records an increase from the previous number of 2.000 Unit for Sep 2018. United Kingdom Number of New Issues: UK data is updated monthly, averaging 4.000 Unit from Jan 2018 (Median) to Oct 2018, with 10 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 15.000 Unit in Mar 2018 and a record low of 2.000 Unit in Sep 2018. United Kingdom Number of New Issues: UK data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by London Stock Exchange. The data is categorized under Global Database’s United Kingdom – Table UK.Z012: London Stock Exchange: Number of Issues and Cancellations.

The British Social Attitudes Survey began in 1983 with the aim of monitoring patterns of continuity and change in attitudes to social issues. It asks a representative sample of people questions covering social, political and moral issues.

This teaching dataset has been created from the original British Social Attitudes Survey, 2017 (SN 8450), which interviewed 3,988 adults aged 18 and over. It has been adapted for teaching with a reduced number of variables on the theme of attitudes towards the environment and politics.

The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) is a longitudinal birth cohort study, following a nationally representative sample of over 17,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1970. Cohort members have been surveyed throughout their childhood and adult lives, mapping their individual trajectories and creating a unique resource for researchers. It is one of very few longitudinal studies following people of this generation anywhere in the world.

Since 1970, cohort members have been surveyed at ages 5, 10, 16, 26, 30, 34, 38, 42, 46, and 51. Featuring a range of objective measures and rich self-reported data, BCS70 covers an incredible amount of ground and can be used in research on many topics. Evidence from BCS70 has illuminated important issues for our society across five decades. Key findings include how reading for pleasure matters for children's cognitive development, why grammar schools have not reduced social inequalities, and how childhood experiences can impact on mental health in mid-life. Every day researchers from across the scientific community are using this important study to make new connections and discoveries.

BCS70 is run by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS), a research centre in the UCL Institute of Education, which is part of University College London. The content of BCS70 studies, including questions, topics and variables can be explored via the CLOSER Discovery website.

How to access genetic and/or bio-medical sample data from a range of longitudinal surveys:
For information on how to access biomedical data from BCS70 that are not held at the UKDS, see the CLS Genetic data and biological samples webpage.

Polygenic Indices
Polygenic indices are available under Special Licence SN 9439. Derived summary scores have been created that combine the estimated effects of many different genes on a specific trait or characteristic, such as a person's risk of Alzheimer's disease, asthma, substance abuse, or mental health disorders, for example. These polygenic scores can be combined with existing survey data to offer a more nuanced understanding of how cohort members' outcomes may be shaped.

Secure Access datasets
Secure Access versions of BCS70 have more restrictive access conditions than versions available under the standard Safeguarded Licence.

SN 9392 - 1970 British Cohort Study: Age 51, Sweep 11 Geographical Identifiers, 2021 Census Boundaries, 2021-2024: Secure Access includes detailed geographical variables from the BCS70 Age 51 Sweep 11 that can be linked to the main End User Licence data, available under SN 9347 - 1970 British Cohort Study: Age 51, Sweep 11, 2021-2024. The Age 51, Sweep 11 2011 Census Boundaries are available under SN 9391.

International Data Access Network (IDAN)
These data are now available to researchers based outside the UK. Selected UKDS SecureLab/controlled datasets from the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) and the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) have been made available under the International Data Access Network (IDAN) scheme, via a Safe Room access point at one of the UKDS IDAN partners. Prospective users should read the UKDS SecureLab application guide for non-ONS data for researchers outside of the UK via Safe Room Remote Desktop Access. Further details about the IDAN scheme can be found on the UKDS International Data Access Network webpage and on the IDAN website.

Persons attending a British citizenship ceremony. (P) Provisional figures.(R) Figures have been revised since the first release of this data, for example to include late returns. Relates to adults over 18 years of age only. Ceremony Attended: A ceremony organised by County or Local Authorities for successful applicants over 18 years of age for British citizenship. At the ceremony the applicant takes the Oath or Affirmation of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen and the Pledge of loyalty to the United Kingdom. Since 1 January 2004 this has been the final stage in the process of attaining British citizenship. Related to: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/migration-statistics Unfortunately as noted in the Citizenship data tables on the gov.uk website, due to data quality issues 2021 and 2022 data cannot currently be provided.