The most important issue facing the country
ComRes had a poll yesterday which got some attention because it showed the NHS as the issue people thought was most important facing the country, up eleven points since they last asked. This followed a YouGov poll last week which showed the NHS in third place in the list of salient issues, but also increasing by 13 percentage points since December, putting it 6 points behind the economy and immigration.
These look like contrasting findings (first place and third place) but they really aren't - both show big increases in the salience of the NHS and similar proportions of people picked out the NHS as a major issue (50% in ComRes, 46% in YouGov). There is a significant difference in the proportion of people picking the economy in the two polls, but that's because of the way the question is asked: YouGov offer a single option for the economy in general (picked by 52%), ComRes offer three or four different economicy sort of options that responses were split between (promoting growth (20%), distributing benefits of growth (20%), reducing the deficit (19%), keeping down costs (25%)).
This highlights one of the challenges of asking "important issues" questions like this - they are really influenced by the options you offer. The other regular important issues tracker by Ipsos MORI doesn't suffer from this problem as it is asked face-to-face and completely open ended - people are asked to say what issues they think are important in their own words... but Ipsos MORI still have to decide how to code them up. In December MORI found the most important issues were immigration (42%), economy (33%), NHS (33%). We haven't had their January figures yet and if they pick up the same trend as YouGov and ComRes we should expect to see a big jump for the NHS, but it's up there in the top three already anyway.
Exactly which issue comes "top" isn't really that important anyway unless you are a headline writer. It's not like an election, there is no prize that is won by being considered important by one more person than the next issue, and which issue comes "top" in a poll is largely determined by how pollsters divide up the options or categorise people's responses. The point is that immigration and the economy have been considered important issues by very large proportions of the British public for a couple of years and, for now at least (for the ComRes and YouGov polls were taken in the immediate aftermath of some very negative headlines about the NHS), the NHS has become an issue of comparable importance.
On that issue, we should have a big lovely lump of Ashcroft polling on the NHS out tomorrow.
