A political snapshot: Member Survey 2024

Earlier this summer, in the aftermath of the general election, we ran our latest Member Survey, inviting you to tell us about how you voted, your policy interests and how you felt about the direction of the country. Here is what you told us, writes Jonathan Green, Prospect’s Head of Research.

The Prospect All Member survey is always a crucial exercise as it gives us an insight into who our members are, and the things that you care about the most.

After all, as a member-led organisation, it’s your priorities that drive our work as a union.

The survey is perhaps especially important in an election year; even more so when we’ve had a change of government.

Although Prospect is proudly independent, and unbeholden to any political party, we know that our members expect us to speak up for them to governments of all colours.

A more detailed summary of the survey results (including sectoral breakdowns) is available to download from the Prospect Library but here, below, is a broad snapshot of the main findings.

Election 2024

How you voted

• Overall, 44% of membership voted for Labour in the general election, 18% Lib Dem, 9% Conservative, 13% Green, 8% Reform UK. The vote for the SNP was 35% in Scotland and Plaid Cymru was 20% in Wales.

Voter motivations

• The biggest driver for people’s vote was the policies of the party they voted for (53%) with tactical voting to stop another party winning taking second place (19%).
• Across the full membership, health and the NHS were seen to be the most important issues facing the country (67%), followed by the economy (35%), environmental issues (34%), public services and benefits (24%), inequality (22%) and housing/house prices (20%)

Outlook

·       67% of members believe that the new Labour government will make things better for the country – though there is less optimism that things will improve for them, or their family (47%), or for the industry that they work in (46%.)

Policies

• Labour’s proposed New Deal is broadly supported across the union. The most popular measures are greater access rights for unions, ending fire and rehire and online voting in statutory ballots.

• Prospect members support greater alignment with the EU. Those that voted remain in 2016 support all three of the propositions in the chart below; 77% of members responding to the survey supported remain, 23% supported leave.

AI

• Members feel that AI will have a negative impact on their industry, negative (41%) than positive (23%).
• Across all sectors, there is little confidence that employer use of AI to track and manage its workforce would be transparent or ethical – although there is also a lot of uncertainty among members, suggesting that knowledge of AI use in this way is limited at this point.
• Members are more concerned about the impact AI will have on the industry they work in than on their own job security, but there is less optimism that it will improve things for their personal job security.

Job security and well-being

• For most members, there has been a small improvement in their financial position in the last year, but there are still more members that feel financially worse off, than better off, compared with 12 months previously (21% better off, 43% worse off.)
• A higher proportion of members feel neither more, or less, secure in their job (63%) than they did 12 months ago, while just over a quarter of all members report feeling insecurity in their job (26%).
• Nearly a third (31%) of all members say their mental health and wellbeing has got worse in the last year.

Download the Prospect briefing on the survey results from the Prospect Library.