YouGov's post Spending Review poll

The full results of YouGov's post CSR poll for the Sun are now up on the YouGov's website here.

YouGov reasked many the economic questions from their pre-spending review poll at the start of the week to see if attitudes has shifted. Mostly they hadn't. There were slight increases in the Conservative lead over Labour on cutting the deficit and encouraging growth, but on the other hand, the proportion of people thinking the cuts were unfair and avoidable both rose slightly. No changes were large enough to be sure the shifts weren't just margin of error - the big picture remains that people think the cuts are unavoidable and Labour's fault...but are being done unfairly and too fast.

Turning to the details of the spending review, most of the measures in the review were actually pretty popular. Large majorities supported the permanent levy on banks (82%), withdrawing child benefits from households with higher-rate taxpayers (74%), putting a cap on the benefits a single household can receive (84%) and - unsurprisingly - ending MPs final salary pensions (85%). There was also strong approval for the reduction in the BBC budget (64%), making public sector workers contribute more to their pensions (59%), freezing the basic level of the working tax credit (56%), and increasing the rent paid by future council tenants (49%).

Opinion was more evenly divided on increasing the state pension age to 66 (49% support, but 40% oppose), reducing the availability of legal aid (42% support, 42% oppose), allowing higher rate taxpayers over 60 to keep bus passes and winter fuel allowance (43% support, 47% oppose) and cutting 490,000 public sector jobs (39% support, 44% oppose).

Only two of the items YouGov asked about met with majority opposition - using more community sentencing rather than prison was opposed by 60%, while allowing rail fares to rise faster than inflation was overwhelmingly opposed, with 80% against.

However, as we've often seen in polls after budgets, people's reactions to budgets and spending reviews are much more than just whether there are more popular measures than unpopular measures. In the past we've seen budgets where people told pollsters they liked all the specific things asked about in the poll, but thought the budget as a whole was bad. It's the overall impression that counts, and on that front things are a lot more evenly balanced. 40% think the government made the right decisions on where to cut spending, 41% think they made the wrong decisions. 44% thought the cuts were too harsh, 44% thought they were about right or too cautious (38% and 6% respectively).

So far, it looks as though reactions to the spending review are pretty evenly balanced. Whether this is good or bad news for the government is, I suppose, a question of expectations. If you thought their support would plummet after cuts, this is good for them, if you thought it may have bolstered their position in a similar fashion to the emergency budget this should be disappointing.

It's also worth noting that the public do sometimes take time to react to events - all of the fieldwork for this poll was conducted after the spending review, but about half was conducted before this morning's papers, and reactions to the announcements will probably continue over the next fews days. The initial response is not always the same after a few days.