The May 2025 local elections delivered a brutal verdict. Labour lost almost 1,500 seats, ceding control of authorities across England, while Reform UK surged forward, successfully securing seats and dominating the media narrative. Commentators reached for explanations, all of which can be considered plausible in the English context:
- Labour was heavily punished as a governing party – the historic midterm experience.
- Labour’s support fragmented in multiple ideological directions (Green, Reform and, in the devolved nations, Plaid Cymru and the SNP).
- Reform became the main channel for working‑class protest.
- Anger over immigration, the cost of living and governance outweighed loyalty.
- A perceived lack of delivery by Labour predominated, as well as concerns over leadership.
But there’s a more uncomfortable story here, one that forces us to confront a tension at the heart of progressive politics: the party with the strongest evidence base for tackling poverty lost ground to a party whose manifesto offered almost nothing.
Before the 2024 general election, the Academics Stand Against Poverty Audit assessed each party’s manifesto against evidence-based recommendations for reducing poverty. Labour scored significantly higher than the Conservatives and dramatically higher than Reform UK, which received just 0.9 out of 5 – the lowest score of any party assessed. Reform’s proposals, weighted towards tax cuts for higher earners and immigration restrictions, had weak or negative evidence bases for poverty reduction.
And yet Reform surged. Labour collapsed. What does this tell us about the relationship between good policy and successful politics?
The Audit’s findings: A tale of two failures
The ASAP Audit evaluated manifestos across key policy areas: social security, housing, employment, health and living standards. Its methodology was straightforward: to measure commitments against what research and frontline evidence indicate would meaningfully reduce poverty.
Labour’s manifesto showed ambition gaps. On social security, the party avoided pledges on benefit adequacy and failed to commit to abolishing the two-child limit: a policy pushing an estimated 250,000 children into poverty. On housing, promises around supply and renters’ rights were welcome but insufficient to address the affordability crisis. On employment, minimum wage commitments were positive, but the manifesto lacked a comprehensive strategy for tackling in-work poverty.
Reform’s manifesto was a different proposition entirely. Its flagship policies (cutting taxes, reducing immigration, shrinking the state) would, according to the analysis, do little to address poverty and might actively worsen it. Lower-income households gain least from income tax cuts; immigration restrictions don’t address the structural causes of wage stagnation; reduced public spending hits those who depend most on public services.
The Audit’s verdict was clear: Labour’s manifesto was insufficient but pointed in the right direction; Reform’s was actively counterproductive. Yet, two years later, voters delivered the opposite judgment.
Policy effectiveness is not a political appeal
Here lies the uncomfortable truth the progressive policy community must confront: the ASAP Audit measures whether policies are likely to reduce poverty, not whether they are popular, emotionally resonant or effectively communicated. These are fundamentally different things.
Reform offered simple, confident narratives. Immigration is driving down wages and straining public services. Taxes are too high. The establishment has failed you. These claims connect emotionally with voters experiencing economic insecurity, even when the proposed solutions wouldn’t address the underlying causes, and could risk making things worse.
Most voters don’t read manifestos, let alone cross-reference them with academic audits. Electoral choices are shaped by perceived authenticity, emotional validation and the desire to punish parties that have disappointed. Reform positioned itself as an outsider willing to say what mainstream politicians won’t. For voters who feel ignored or condescended to, that authenticity matters more than a policy scorecard.
Labour, by contrast, offered caution dressed as competence. The 2024 manifesto was designed to avoid attack lines, not to inspire. It succeeded in winning a landslide but failed to build a mandate for transformative action – or to inoculate the government against populist challengers offering bolder stories about what’s wrong and who’s to blame.
The trust deficit
Underpinning Reform’s rise is something deeper than policy: a collapse in trust in politicians. When voters believe all politicians lie, manifesto content matters less than perceived authenticity.
The data is stark. The British Social Attitudes survey found just 12 per cent of the public trust governments to place national interests above party interests. The Ipsos Veracity Index puts trust in politicians to tell the truth at around 11 per cent – below advertising executives.
This distrust doesn’t punish all parties equally. Labour carries the weight of accumulated disappointment; Reform, having never governed, carries no record of broken promises. Farage’s outsider positioning lets him validate voter cynicism rather than ask them to overcome it.
Labour’s cautious manifesto backfired twice: it failed to address material hardship boldly enough, and failed to generate excitement that might cut through cynicism. Voters who distrust everyone will back the insurgent who agrees with them.
The vacuum labour created
This is where the Audit’s findings become directly relevant to Labour’s losses. The manifesto scored higher than Reform’s – but ‘higher’ isn’t the same as ‘sufficient’. The Audit identified significant gaps between what Labour promised and what evidence suggests is needed to address poverty and living standards.
Those gaps have played out in government. The two-child limit remains in place despite mounting evidence of its impact on child poverty. The decision to means-test winter fuel payments removed support from millions of pensioners, many vulnerable to fuel poverty. Energy prices remain high, housing costs continue rising, and the government has struggled to articulate a coherent response to the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
When a governing party fails to offer bold responses to economic hardship, voters seeking change look elsewhere. Reform positioned itself as the party of disruption. In the absence of a compelling alternative from Labour, a party constrained by its own cautious manifesto, that message found an audience.
Reform’s success is partly a consequence of Labour’s ambition gap. The Audit warned that Labour’s commitments were insufficient; voters who experienced that insufficiency in government became available to parties promising something different, even if that something wouldn’t actually help them.
The politics of decline vs. the politics of evidence
There’s a broader dynamic here that anyone committed to evidence-based policy must reckon with.
Reform’s appeal rests on a declinist narrative: Britain has gone wrong, institutions have failed and radical disruption is needed. This story is powerful in an era of stagnant wages, crumbling public services and housing unaffordability. It identifies villains –immigrants, elites, bureaucrats – and promises catharsis through confrontation. We have seen success with such narratives previously: the then opposition Conservative Party led by David Cameron utilised the Broken Britain report to drive its own policy agenda.
Evidence-based policy tends towards the opposite. It is incremental, technocratic and modest in its promises. It deals in trade-offs and implementation challenges. It doesn’t offer the emotional satisfaction of named enemies or the thrill of promised transformation.
Reform’s policies may score 0.9 out of 5 on poverty reduction, but they score highly on giving voters a story about why their lives are hard and who’s responsible. Labour, constrained first by a cautious manifesto and then by the realities of government, has struggled to offer a comparably compelling counternarrative. The result is a government that may have the better evidence but has lost the better argument.
What would a different approach look like?
The ASAP Audit didn’t just diagnose problems – it pointed towards solutions. A government serious about poverty reduction would reform social security to reflect the genuine cost of essentials, abolish the two-child limit, introduce a social tariff for energy, tackle housing affordability directly rather than just supply, and confront in-work poverty through stronger employment rights and investment in social infrastructure.
None of this is utopian. These are evidence-based interventions that would make measurable differences to millions of households. But they require something the 2024 manifesto avoided: ambition, and the willingness to make the political case for it.
The lesson of Reform’s success is not that evidence doesn’t matter – it’s that evidence alone isn’t enough. Progressive policy must be married to progressive storytelling. Voters need to understand not just what a government will do, but why their lives are difficult and how proposed policies connect to that diagnosis. Reform offers a false diagnosis and counterproductive remedies, but it offers them with conviction. Labour offered a more accurate diagnosis and better remedies, but whispered them apologetically.
The cost of caution
The ASAP Audit warned that Labour’s manifesto was insufficient to the scale of the poverty crisis. That warning has proved accurate, not just in policy outcomes, but in political consequences. The government is trapped between limited commitments and unlimited expectations, while a party with almost no evidence base for its poverty claims hoovers up votes from the very communities Labour exists to serve.
The path forward requires two things. First, policy ambition: the Audit’s recommendations remain a roadmap for meaningful poverty reduction. Second, political courage: the willingness to make the case for that ambition in terms that resonate emotionally, not just technically.
Reform has demonstrated that voters are hungry for parties that acknowledge how hard their lives have become and promise to do something about it. The tragedy is that the party offering false solutions is winning the argument against the party that could offer real ones – if only it had the confidence to try.
Lee Gregory is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham and Chair of Academics Stand Against Poverty UK Trustees.
Read all the articles in the Academics Stand Against Poverty blog series here.
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