Issues with Issues

We don’t seem to care about public transport. What do we care about?

Here’s an incredibly dull chart showing the proportion of people who list ‘public transport’ as one of the three issues most important to them at the moment.

It’s a rolling average (the last three months), and that rolling average never drops below 3.5% and never rises above 5.1%. Of the twenty-plus issues we ask about (and have asked about, every month since January 2023 – nearly 40 times) it is the most stable and the least changing. Is this unfair?

Most of us use public transport at least some of the time and those of us that are fortunate enough to have public transport options use it a lot. Bringing the railways into public ownership is a landmark policy of the current government. People (well, men) got so excited about the Elizabeth Line they took people on first (and probably last) dates there. Last year four train operators were nationalised. Seven UK cities have tram services. I saw Andy Burnham speak at a recent Resolution Foundation event and I can report that bus fares in Manchester is basically the whole platform upon which his Prime Ministerial ambitions are built (I’m paraphrasing, there’s a couple of other bits as well). Good public transport infrastructure is a cornerstone of economic growth.

And yet: the line remains flat. Perhaps it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen even a single spike in the data for public concern about public transport. Because, to be honest, we haven’t seen much change at all.

There are only a few real stories here. In more than three years of data, only inflation/cost of living or the NHS/healthcare has been top of the tree. The NHS has never been selected by fewer than 40% of the sample or more than 50%. Inflation/Cost of Living was especially dominant in 2023 but since then has occupied similar territory to healthcare.

Below these utterly dominant issues are the second order ones. The economy generally (a related but distinct issue to the cost of living) has consistently polled between 31% and 37%. Alongside it is immigration, which is one of the only real change stories in the data. Mimicking Reform’s voting intention polling very neatly, it has gradually grown through the last couple of years, peaking in the mid-30s late last year, before dropping down slightly.

For virtually everything else, fewer than 15% (about one in seven) people say that issue is one of the most important to them. We almost never see meaningful spikes in attention or new issues breaking through to dominate public concern. That’s true when conflict erupts in Europe or the Middle East, when the US president imposes tariffs on penguins or proposes the annexation of Greenland. It’s true when the UK edges closer to Europe on trade or mobility. It’s true when stories about SEND provision or housing targets dominate. And it’s true when the government renationalises parts of the railways.

In fact, of the 21 issues we ask about, only eight could be said to have meaningfully changed in the last few years.

Five of these are declining in salience. Although the NHS and Inflation dominate the rankings every month, both have declined in absolute terms. Neither are on the minds of as many people as they were, even while they’re on the minds of many. The economy more generally has experienced a similar trend: widely selected, but not as widely as before. Completing this quintet is the environment and the war in Ukraine. Both undoubtedly critical issues. Both should be of huge concern. Neither currently on the issues podium for more than 1 in 10 people.

That leaves just three issues which are rising in salience: immigration, national security and crime.

What does this mean?

The news seems to move at breakneck speed. We’ve written before in these pixels of the overstated concern about ‘news avoidance’ – the idea that people are checking out of the news or deliberately avoiding it, based on answers to some survey questions. Without wishing to completely retread these boards, we’re not sure that’s what’s happening. People are avoiding the news because there’s so much of it, and because it’s gone from opt-in to always on.

But within this speed there’s no shortage of issues. The last few weeks has seen, non-exhaustively: an ongoing row about the Chagos islands, the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, thousands of homes in Kent and Sussex being left without water, speculation about a social media ban for under 16s, the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, a ban on junk food advertising, the unveiling of Reform’s new ‘shadow’ frontbench, a rise in inflation, a drop in inflation, a U-turn on local elections, a U-turn on hospitality business rates, the UK joining a major new offshore windfarm scheme, an escalation in the war in Ukraine and an escalation in pre-war preparations by the US towards Iran.

But although the headlines change by the minute, our concerns change more slowly. Inflation has been under 5% since 2023, but still it is the dominant focus for the largest group of people. British and overseas leaders have been warning about the dangerous new era of variable geometry we find ourselves in, but ‘national security’ has ‘surged’ from 5% to 13% on our tracker.

That said, slow change is not no change. Longer running issues trackers (like Ipsos MORI’s) demonstrate clear eras where public concerns coalesced around specific, sometimes acute issues. But even in that tracker, the most consistently dominant forces – especially around elections – are health and economic ones.

At the same time, just because something doesn’t poll very highly on an issues tracker like this, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, it’s just not the top priority. Here, public transport could get filed alongside net zero, education and Britain’s relationship with the EU. Large numbers of people care about these things - but only a small proportion would say they’re a top concern at the moment.

So, while the pace of the news will seem overwhelmingly frenetic, what the public prioritise is pretty consistent. And issues move slowly enough to spot them coming – if you’re paying attention. The next election is (probably) three years away, but you’d be bold to bet on anything – even public transport – being a bigger determinant of voting than health or prices.

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