Labour regains lead as Nigel Farage’s Reform slips in YouGov model

More than a third of seats would be decided on margins of less than five points, including 82 projected Reform UK wins.

LONDON – Labour would win the most seats if a British general election were held tomorrow, according to a detailed poll that gives Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s outfit a boost ahead of its annual conference and reflects a drop in support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. 

The governing party would win 241 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, compared to 130 for the main opposition Conservative Party and 123 for Reform, according to YouGov’s survey, its first in-depth survey since Burnham came to power in July.

While that’s well down on the 411 seats Labour won in the 2024 general election, it’s almost 100 seats more than YouGov’s poll a year ago showed.

The results bolster Labour heading into its conference, which starts on Sept 27 in Liverpool, showing the potential electoral benefit stemming from its decision to depose Keir Starmer as leader and premier just two years after he secured a massive majority.

It also highlights how support for Reform has come off the boil amid increasing scrutiny over political donations to the insurgent party. 

It’s a stark contrast from 2025’s conference, when YouGov projected Labour would shed two-thirds of its seats in a historic defeat, including those of most Cabinet ministers.

If the latest survey were to pan out, Labour would be the largest party in a hung Parliament, dependent on other parties to form a government.

Even if they formed an alliance with the Liberal Democrats – who YouGov projects would win 71 seats – they would be short of an outright majority. 

YouGov sampled 14,000 respondents between Aug 23 and Sept 18 in a so-called multilevel regression and post-stratification poll, known as MRP, which models seat-by-seat results.

The Times reported the poll earlier.

Allies of the prime minister have said he’s not planning to call a snap general election, and YouGov’s survey highlights why: he would lose his majority.

Despite a so-called Burnham Bounce, the pollster found Labour would still only win 24 per cent of the vote – the party’s lowest share since 1918.

The 241 seats it’s projected to win would fall short of its losing tally in the 2017 and 2010 elections. 

YouGov warned of “uncertainty” due to the closeness of constituency modelling.

In aggregate, it put Reform on 22 per cent and the Tories on 21 per cent, putting the gap between the three parties within the margin of error.

Proponents have argued a fresh election would allow Burnham to win his own mandate, free of the promises of the party’s last election manifesto, while catching Reform on the back foot, as the populist outfit fights off scandals and before it can benefit from two record-breaking donations totalling £72 million (S$121.88 million) that it received earlier in September.

Reform has denied any wrongdoing in its fundraising activities. 

YouGov’s survey also showed how tight it is between the parties as Britain moves away from the Labour-Tory duopoly of the past century and embraces multi-party politics.

More than a third of seats would be decided on margins of less than five points, including 82 projected Reform wins, making Farage’s outfit particularly vulnerable to tactical voting, according to the pollster.

“A small shift in national sentiment or a modest and plausible level of tactical switching could dramatically change seat numbers,” Rob Ford, a political scientist at the University of Manchester, said in a post on Bluesky. 

Separate polling from YouGov shows that a growing proportion of voters are willing to vote tactically against Reform.

That reinforces the results of July’s Manchester mayoral election, when left-wing voters whose first choice was knocked out in the first round of voting were more likely to support Labour in the second round than right-wing voters were to rally around Reform.

Reform currently has only 8 Members of Parliament – having won five in the 2024 general election before welcoming Conservative defectors into the fold.

YouGov’s survey suggested the former Tories Robert Jenrick (Reform’s Treasury spokesman), Suella Braverman and Danny Kruger would all lose their seats to their former party. 

There are nevertheless opportunities for Reform, which currently trails Labour by less than five percentage points in 45 seats.

In a similar number of seats, Farage’s party would beat Labour if it could win all of the votes going to Rupert Lowe’s far-right Restore party.

Lowe himself won a seat for Reform in 2024 before being ejected from the party and setting up his own. 

YouGov’s survey also suggests the Conservatives have begun the job of fixing their relationship with the electorate under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership.

A year ago, YouGov’s MRP poll had them winning just 45 seats to be just the fourth biggest party in Parliament.

Their new tally of 130 would be a small advance on the 121 seats they won in 2024, albeit well below the 365 they won in 2019.

The latest survey put the Scottish National Party on 40 seats, up from just 9 in 2024, with the Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru almost quadrupling their presence to 15 seats.

The Greens would more than double their small representation in Parliament to 9 seats, while failing to make the breakthrough that seemed possible when the left-wing party was higher in the polls earlier in 2026. BLOOMBERG