The report, The Quiet Revival, published in April 2025, claimed that 12% of people in England and Wales attended church once a month or more – an increase from 8% recorded in a previous study in 2018. The report also indicated a rise in church attendance among young people.

Following scrutiny of the report’s findings, including from the Pew Research Center, YouGov’s platform and data sciences teams re-analysed the data from 2024 using new tools and techniques.

In a statement, YouGov said the work found that “specific demographic groups particularly emphasised in this survey contained a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent”. This occurred “at a higher rate than typical amongst other polls at the time and enough to make a few points difference to the key result”, the company said.

YouGov said the error was due to some anti-fraud measures – available in 2024 – not being administered effectively, and said the survey was particularly vulnerable to sample quality issues. The survey had included quotas interlocking age and ethnicity, with a focus on obtaining a representative sample of younger people by ethnicity.

YouGov said fraudulent respondents tend to have a bigger impact among harder to reach groups as there are “fewer available genuine respondents”.

YouGov’s chief executive Stephan Shakespeare said: “YouGov takes full responsibility for the outputs of the original 2024 research, and we apologise for what has happened. We would like to stress that Bible Society have at all times accurately and responsibly reported the data we supplied to them.”

YouGov is running an updated survey with the Bible Society again this year, with fieldwork set to take place by early summer.

The Bible Society said it had “repeatedly sought and received assurances from YouGov” over the methodology’s robustness and the reliability of the report’s conclusions. 

The organisation said in a statement that it was informed by YouGov at the beginning of March this year that the company had not properly activated quality control technologies, meaning that a statistically significant proportion of responses were of low quality or otherwise unreliable. 

The Bible Society said: “We are therefore deeply disappointed that YouGov not only made an error but also that it only discovered this so recently. We are grateful that YouGov’s chief executive officer Stephan Shakespeare has personally apologised.”

“The reason we commissioned this research in the first place is that we want to understand what is truly happening on the ground. We would wish to stress that YouGov’s error does not mean that all of the findings were wrong – it means that we cannot reliably support those findings on the basis of this survey.”