The research, which is an early release looking at figures from September and October 2025, found that 36% of respondents felt that government should increase taxes and spend more, down four points from 2024 and 19 points below the figure recorded in NatCen’s 2022 survey.

The changes meant that the proportion of the population wanting taxes and spending to rise was at its lowest level since 2013.

There was also an all-time high of 19% of respondents who said that taxes and government spending should be reduced, up four points from 2024 and more than double the level seen in 2022 ( 8%).

In comparison, over the last three years, the proportion saying that taxes and spending should be reduced had never been as high as 10%.

The proportion of respondents who agreed that the government should spend more on welfare also dropped further in the latest survey to equal the all-time low of 27% previously recorded in 2009. 

The report also suggested that attitudes towards taxation and spending have become more polarised, with 29% of right-wing voters wanting reductions in 2025, compared with 10% in 2022. There were 21% who wanted a rise in taxes and spending in 2025, down from 43% in 2022.

In contrast, 10% of left-wing voters wanted lower taxes and spending and 52% wanted a rise, compared with 5% and 69% in 2022.

On immigration, 33% of respondents said that immigration was bad for the economy – the highest proportion since 2013.

In contrast, 32% said immigration was good for the economy, down from 35% in 2024 and the lowest level since 2013.

The British Social Attitudes survey also found that 34% of respondents felt immigration ‘undermined’ British cultural life, compared with 32% who felt it ‘enriched’ it. The proportion feeling that immigration undermined cultural life was at its highest level since 2013.

The fieldwork for the British Social Attitudes survey took place between 26^th August and 6^th October 2025 using a push-to-web design, with telephone options also available. Overall, 4,680 interviews took place.

Speaking in a webinar last week on the latest findings from the British Social Attitudes survey, Alex Scholes, research director on the attitudinal surveys and NatCen opinion panel team, said that “the latest survey is the clearest indication that the public has begun to react against the expansion of the state we witnessed post-Covid”.

Nina Skero, chief executive at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said in the webinar that the UK potentially faced an economic turning point.

“In some ways the system is polarised, and has become increasingly polarised over time,” Skero said.

“The UK, although not facing an immediate fiscal crisis, could be on the precipice of a turning point. The combination of a larger state, a more concentrated taxation system and declining satisfaction with public services would suggest that we are in a fragile equilibrium.”

Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said in the webinar that immigration scepticism was higher than in past years, but still below historical levels seen prior to past decade. This meant the public was “a little more sceptical” rather than heavily antagonistic towards migration, Curtice added.

“It does seem to be the case that the much higher levels of immigration the public have experienced in recent years, and continue to experience, have raised new doubts about whether the immigration we are having is beneficial,” Curtice said. “But we are still not back, in terms of our scepticism of all of this, to where we were 15 years ago.”

Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, added in the webinar that “the people who get exercised about immigration, who organise around it and seek to change policy on it, are almost all from the group that doesn’t like immigration”. He said that this tends to “introduce a skew into the debate as the issue is carried on in politics, as opposed to what it looks like in terms of the distribution of opinion”.

He concluded that Labour faced a political conundrum due to the polarised views towards immigration across the political spectrum.

“There is a substantial risk to the Labour government of today that in saying things that sympathise with voters sceptical about immigration, they shoot themselves in the foot a bit, because they antagonise the average Labour voter,” Ford explained.

“But they will never be sufficiently anti-immigration to be credible with the average Conservative or Reform voter, who is very strongly anti-immigration. They end up falling into a no-man’s land where they don’t really please anyone at all, which is a very different political conundrum to the one for their predecessors of 20 years ago.”