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A record share of people in the UK say taxes and public spending should be cut, according to a leading survey that highlights a widening political divide.
The latest British Social Attitudes report, published on Tuesday by the National Centre for Social Research, showed that 19 per cent of people said taxes and spending should be reduced, the highest since comparable data was first available in 1983, and more than three times the all-time average of 6 per cent.
Alex Scholes, research director at the National Centre for Social Research, said: “The latest survey is the first clear indication that the public has begun to react against the expansion of the state we’ve witnessed post Covid.”
UK public debt rose from 80 per cent of GDP in the fiscal year of 2019 to 94 per cent in 2024, the highest since the early 1960s, reflecting high spending during the pandemic.
The Labour government announced £26bn in tax rises last year, following £40bn of tax increases in the 2024 Budget, raising the overall burden to a record high of 38 per cent of GDP by the end of parliament.
Support for increased spending on welfare benefits for the poor fell to 27 per cent, matching the lowest level ever recorded, according to the report, which is based on 4,680 interviews between August 26 and October 6 last year, ahead of the November budget.
Scholes noted that divisions between different groups of voters on taxation and spending, and others, such as immigration, “have only become more pronounced”.
In 2025, 29 per cent of Conservative and Reform supporters favoured reducing taxes and spending, compared with the 10 per cent average for Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green supporters. This 19 percentage points gap is much larger than the 5 percentage point difference in 2022 and the 3 percentage point gap in 2010.
The political divide has grown even starker on migration, with 57 per cent of supporters of Conservatives, Reform or the UK Independence Party saying that immigration is bad for the economy, compared with 13 per cent of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green supporters.
The figures show that, on taxation and migration, “identifying a policy that is going to be broadly popular is difficult at the moment,” said John Curtice, senior research fellow at NatCen.
Overall, public attitudes towards immigration have become more sceptical following recent record levels of migration, but remain less negative than they were a decade ago.
Net migration surged after Brexit to a peak of 944,000 people in the year to March 2023, but has sharply declined since then.
The public has “reacted to the substantial expansion of migration,” said Curtice, “but they’re not necessarily as antagonistic” as in the early 2010s.
The findings come as a separate analysis on Tuesday by the Resolution Foundation showed growth in disposable income for working-age families in the poorest half of Britain slowed sharply in the 2020s.
The think-tank calculated that with incomes set to grow just 0.5 per cent annually during the 2020s, it would take 137 years for lower-income families to see the doubling of living standards that had previously been enjoyed every 40 years.
Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, said: “The stalling of disposable incomes means that many families’ hopes of home ownership have evaporated and work is not a guaranteed route out of poverty.”