Since February 2025, we at the Electoral Reform Society have been collecting data on UK general election voting intention polls published by British Polling Council (BPC) members.
The year since has seen the continuation of a trend decades in the making but which has now reached unprecedented levels: the breakdown of the UK’s post-war two-party political system and its replacement with a multi-party system, which is the norm throughout Europe.
Unfortunately, unlike in the rest of Europe, we have a voting system – First Past the Post – designed for a two-party environment. When people express their political preferences in a wider variety of ways the system starts to sputter and breakdown, producing increasingly chaotic outcomes that do not properly reflect how people have voted.
To see evidence of the extent to which the UK is becoming a multi-party nation, let’s turn our attention to the polling data for March 2026. This month saw a bumper crop of polls from BPC members. Twelve different companies published polls, a monthly high since the ERS started collecting this data a year ago.
March UK Polling Averages
The average (mean) vote shares from the most recent March poll by each of those twelve companies, is as follows:
* Each month a different combination of pollsters will publish polls, so this change is not strictly comparing like with like, but gives a general sense of change
The party with the highest vote share has the support of only just over a quarter of voters. There is only a 15-point gap between the 1st and 5th placed parties, the smallest we have seen since we started collecting this data. The combined Conservative and Labour vote share is just 37.1%, a significant drop on the combined 57.4% they achieved at the 2024 general election, itself a record low.
The Green Party’s vote share represents its highest monthly average vote share since the party’s formation. Indeed, this week’s YouGov poll had the Greens in joint 2nd place, behind Reform UK.
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First Past the Post: A system under strain
The days of a vast majority of people voting for one of two ‘major parties’ are gone. Unfortunately, the electoral system designed for those days, First Past The Post (FPTP), is still very much with us for UK general elections.
First Past the Post resulted in the most disproportional general election result ever in 2024, when Labour won almost two-thirds of seats, from just over one-third of votes. With the continued rise of multi-party politics since then, it is likely to result in even more random and chaotic results in future.
This outdated system simply cannot cope with how people are expressing their democratic preferences in 2026. We are seeing increasing numbers of MPs and councillors elected with under one-third of votes, meaning the views of over two-thirds of voters are simply ignored.
In addition, First Past the Post often causes voters to feel under pressure to vote ‘tactically’, where they have to consider voting for a party that is not their favourite, to try to stop a party they really dislike from winning. This is not how democracy should work but there is a real danger that our next general election will be dominated by tactical discussions of who people should vote for to keep out other parties, rather than a debate about competing visions for the country.
Now is the time to make the case for change
We need a new proportional voting system, one that reflects the new realities of multi-party politics in the UK and which would mean people could express the genuine democratic preferences without having to worry about tactical considerations.
The Representation of the People Bill is currently making its way through parliament. This bill includes several important changes we’ve long campaigned for – this is real progress. But there is a huge missing piece.
If this Bill is going to live up to its name, it must replace the outdated First Past the Post system with a proportional one – where seats in Parliament actually reflect how people vote.
March’s polling average was compiled using data from the following pollsters – BMG; Find Out Now; Focaldata; Freshwater Strategy; Ipsos; J.L. Partners; More In Common; Opinium; Survation; Techne; Verian; YouGov.
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