Key takeaways
- Survey experiment pitched spending areas as head to heads and asked respondents to say which they thought the government spent more on
- Interest on government debt came top, being chosen as the 'higher spending' option 76% of the time
- Housing and transport came bottom of our list of 11 spending areas
- Public appear to overestimate debt interest, public order, and overseas aid compared to actual ranking of spending areas, while underestimating spending on pensioners, education and transport
With Rachel Reeves set to deliver her second budget at the end of November, a new YouGov survey investigates public perceptions of government spending across a number of sectors, to gauge whether they know where their tax money is ending up.
Respondents were asked to look at a random two areas of public spending (from a selection of 11 sectors) and to choose which one they believed had more spending put towards it, with this exercise repeated three times.
Under this methodology, interest on government debt comes top of the list, with 76% picking it as the area of greater spending in those match-ups where it featured. In a more distant second place is the NHS (65%), with working-age benefits ranking similarly (63%).
At the other end of the table, transport (32%) and housing (34%) sit noticeably apart from the rest of the pack at the very bottom.
How do the public’s perceptions of public spending stack up to reality?
Comparing our findings with approximate current spending values* shows some notable discrepancies between perception and reality. The results suggest that spending on interest on government debt, public order and safety, and overseas aid are overestimated, while spending on the state pension and pensioner benefits, education, and transport are underestimated.
These findings align with YouGov’s existing tracker on where the public thinks the government spends too much on. Areas like overseas aid, for which the public thinks the UK spends too much on, are overestimated, beating out areas like transport.
How do perceptions differ by voting intention?
Our analysis reveals differences in perceptions based on current voting intentions, primarily on areas that those voting groups feel passionately about – positively or negatively.
For instance, Conservative and Reform voters substantially overstate overseas aid spending, with it ranking fourth for both groups of voters on 47% and 54% respectively, compared to winning match-ups 25-29% of the time amongst Green, Labour and Lib Dem voters.
Tory and Reform voters are also more likely to have picked working age benefits as the area of higher spending on match-ups in which it featured, at 75% and 69% respectively, compared to 55-56% for Labour and Green voters.
Green voters, by contrast, stand out when it comes to defence, which was picked 64% of the times it came up, ranking third overall as a result, much higher than for voters of any other major parties.
In what is unlikely to reflect negativity towards the health service, current Labour voters are more likely than others to have chosen the NHS as a higher area of public spending when it showed up in the match-ups, at 73% versus 65-67%. This means for Labour voters the NHS effectively ties at the top of the table with debt interest (72%), the only voting group for whom this is the case.
Alongside the Greens, Labour voters are also notably more likely to have picked pensions as a higher area of state spending than other parties’ voters.
*Figures primarily drawn from the IFS’s “Where and how does the government spend its money?” Where there has been substantial change in state expenditure, more recent data from official sources (government departments, ONS, etc) has been used.
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