Health And The Election

A Briefing From The MORI Health Team

At election time, the focus on opinion poll findings tends to be very much on the voting intention figures.

Readers can keep up-to-date on these at MORI Polltrack 169

But the typical campaign poll focuses on much more than this. Over the last few weeks, MORI has being exploring attitudes towards the leaders, the parties and the issues in the election.

In "peacetime", health is always one of the major issues in the public's mind when we ask them to tell us what they think are the most important issues facing Britain. Our March 2005 Political Monitor found 44% mentioning health as one of their main concerns.

(You can see the full trends at Political Monitor: Long Term Trends)

But a number of our campaign polls have asked some specific questions looking at health. In this note we have pulled out a number of headlines. Full details of the individual surveys can be found at Election 2005

The key messages so far are as follows:

• Health care is the single issue named by most of the public as being very important in helping them decide how to vote, as was also the case in 1997 and 2001. Two-thirds of adults (67%) and 73% of those who are absolutely certain that they will vote, pick health care from a list as one of the issues they consider very important. Education (picked by 61%) and law and order (56%) are the only other issues which more than half pick as very important. (MORI/ES, 7-11 April 2005.)

Key Election Issues

Q5 Looking ahead to the next General Election, which, if any, of these issues do you think will be very important to you in helping you decide which party to vote for?

Health care	67%
Education	61%
Law and order	56%
Pensions	49%
Taxation	42%
Asylum	37%
Managing the economy	35%
Protecting the natural environment	28%
Housing	27%
Public transport	26%
Unemployment	25%
Defence	19%
Europe	19%
Iraq	18%
Animal welfare	14%
Constitution / Devolution	8%

Base: 957 British adults 18+, 7-11 April 2005 Source: MORI/Evening Standard

• Women are significantly more likely than men (74% compared to 60%) to say that health care is very important in deciding their vote, but it is the most important single issue for men as well as women. (MORI/ES, 7-11 April 2005.)
• Health care is only slightly less important as an election issue to voters in Scotland (61%), where the devolution arrangements mean that the outcome of the general election should be able to have no effect on health care.
• Labour's policies on health care are more popular than those of the other two major parties. Among the whole public, 34% say they think Labour has the best policies on the issue, 22% the Conservatives and 9% the Liberal Democrats. However, more than a third either say they don't know or that none of the parties has the best policies. Labour's lead among the two-thirds of potential voters who think the issue important is much the same, 36% to 22%; even among this group a quarter feel they don't know whose policies are best, and a further 6% pick none of the parties. (MORI/ES, 7-11 April 2005.)

Issues Important to Decide Vote: Which Party Best

Based: on those choosing

160	% important	Party with best policies	Lab Lead	Change from '01
Health Care	67	22%	+14	-17
		36%
		10%
Education	61	20%	+15	-15
		35%
		16%
Crime / Law & Order	56	38%	-12	-12
		26%
		5%
Pensions	49	23%	+2	-22
		25%
		12%
Taxation	42	30%	-6	-4
		24%
		10%
Asylum / Immigration	37	52%	160	160
		11%
		8%
Economy	35	23%	+30	+5
		53%
		4%
Environment	28	8%	+6	-4
		14%
		25%

Base: All who say each issue is very important, 7-11 April 2005 (Change from February 2001) Source: MORI/Evening Standard

• More of the public expect the quality of health care to improve over the next few years than think it will get worse (by 45% to 26%), though only 8% feel it will get "much better".(MORI/Observer, 7-9 April).
• Tony Blair has a personal lead of 46% to 31% over Michael Howard as being more trusted to deal with schools and hospitals. Middle class respondents (ABC1s) give Blair as great a lead over Howard as do Labour's more natural constituency in the working class (C2DEs). The young (18-34) favour Blair over Howard by two-to-one while those aged 65 and over are almost evenly split. (MORI/Sun, 18-19 April).
• Labour's lead on healthcare has fallen away sharply in the past decade. In July 1995, 61% of those who thought health care was very important to their vote said Labour had the best policies, and only 8% picked the Tories. In April 1997, just before Labour was elected into government, they led by 51% to 13% on the issue; in February 2001, in the final weeks of their first term, they still led the Conservatives by 44% to 13%.
• Health is also an issue where the public tend to feel they understand what the parties are promising. Three in five of the public (62%) feel they are at least "fairly well informed" about the major parties' policies on heath care, more than say so about the other major election issues, though only 9% feel "very well informed". Interestingly, Conservative voters are less likely to feel well informed about party policies on this issue (63%), than Labour or Liberal Democrats (both 71%), even though Tories are more likely to come from groups who generally have a higher-than-average confidence in how well informed they are. (MORI/FT, 7-11 April).
• A third of the public (34%) think that giving people a subsidy to use private hospitals would improve the quality of healthcare available to them personally, while only just over one in five (22%) think it would make it worse. However, there is a wider feeling that such a policy would damage the NHS, 31% saying that it would make the NHS worse and 27% that it would make it better. (MORI/FT, 21-25 April.)

For further details of the work of our Health Team, please go to: NHS & Public Health Research