LONDON — The watchdog meant to police transparency in the U.K.’s polling industry is struggling to punish rogue firms, its own officers warned in a private meeting leaked to POLITICO. Officers of the British Polling Council (BPC) raised concerns at a meeting last week that they lack the power to effectively hold members to account — with one comparing the way the body is currently organized to a “bowling club.” The downbeat comments come amid fresh scrutiny of the booming U.K. polling industry. A Channel 4 News investigation in September accused JL Partners, a prominent pollster founded by former Conservative Party adviser James Johnson, of securing newspaper coverage of two polls in the run-up to elections — without disclosing their links to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The polls had in fact been paid for by two undercover reporters posing as a wealthy American benefactor and his son. The pair had offered their support to Reform via Farage’s advisers Dan Jukes and James Orr. At the time, the BPC said in a statement it was “clear there have been breaches” of the body’s rules and that it would seek further information from JL Partners.
The BPC’s own rulebook states that polling companies must disclose who has commissioned their research and that those who fail to do so can be kicked out. Three people familiar with internal BPC discussions — granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter — said members had since urged the industry body to dismiss JL Partners, arguing the pollster, which declined to comment for this piece, had committed a cut-and-dried violation of the rules. However, the firm has not been expelled more than a month later — prompting concern among some members that the BPC is ill-equipped to deal with any serious misconduct.
One of the people cited above, from a rival pollster to JL Partners, said: “If the BPC isn’t able to kick someone out who’s so brazenly ignoring the spirit of the rules, it does beg the question: what’s the point of it?” Jane Green, the president of the organization, laid bare the scale of the challenge facing the industry body at the behind-closed-doors meeting last week, according to a transcript reviewed by POLITICO. She told the session that the body was set up to deal with “small, little mistakes” that were quickly corrected, but that anything more contentious would be “a nightmare” to deal with, since the BPC is “essentially a club” in which members have “agreed to play nicely.” Without naming JL Partners, she argued there is a risk a pollster could take legal action if the BPC attempts to sanction a member — in which case she and other officers would be personally liable and could face losing their homes. This is not cool,” she said.
The Reform UK controversy erupted at a time the BPC had already been planning to set itself up as a company limited by guarantee, removing the risk of personal liability for its officers. It now faces a wider dilemma over whether to continue in its current form or strengthen its ability to hold members to account. Martin Boon from the public opinion research firm DeltaPoll told the same meeting that the BPC “[doesn’t] have regulatory powers or regulatory budgets, and I think we have to be careful about going down that road,” according to the transcript.
Luke Tryl of pollster More in Common said that “strengthening the complaints bit of what we do” is “really important, because I think people are now looking to the industry [to show] that we are stepping up, we are addressing concerns.” Several members were adamant during the meeting that the BPC should not broaden its remit, the transcript shows, saying that any regulation should be carried out by the separate Market Research Society, which does hold powers to sanction members and is currently conducting a separate review of JL Partners’ conduct. However, BPC members also aired reservations at the meeting that the MRS can sometimes be obliged to follow up on “vexatious,” complaints and has “very little experience” of political research. Green meanwhile told those present that the BPC could struggle to deliver planned training for journalists on Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification (MRP) polls — increasingly used across Westminster — due to a lack of resources.
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