Professor John Curtice and pollsters to face Lords questions on regulation of polls
Professor John Curtice, President of the British Polling Council and BBC election night maven, and his BPC Management Committee colleague Simon Atkinson will next week give evidence to the House of Lords Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media.
The Committee will also hear from leading pollsters ORB International, Ipsos Mori and Survation.
The evidence sessions will start at 10:15am on Tuesday 5 December in Committee Room 2 of the House of Lords. The witnesses details are:
10:15am
- Professor John Curtice, President, British Polling Council
- Simon Atkinson, Management Committee Member, British Polling Council
11:45am
- Johnny Heald, Managing Director, ORB International
- Ben Page, CEO, IPSOS Mori
- Damian Lyons Lowe, Chief Executive, Survation
In the first session the Committee will ask the witnesses about the BPC's internal inquiry into polling methods used in the 2017 General Election and any emerging conclusions, whether a voluntary regulatory model is still appropriate for the polling industry and whether sensationalist media reporting of poll results is as big a problem as inaccuracies in polls themselves.
In the second session the questions will include what lessons polling companies learned from errors in polling around the 2017 General Election, whether the volatility of the current political climate makes polling harder and whether other forms of opinion polls that ask about issues other than voting intention are ever susceptible to manipulation by the organisations that commission them.
