UK student vote ‘shifting further towards Labour’

More students are voting for Labour and fewer for the Conservative Party with every passing UK general election, according to a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute.

The Labour Party tends to perform better in areas with a large percentage of student voters, whereas the Conservative Party was seen to perform worse, the findings suggest.

The Hepi report says that in the 2019 general election, Labour’s share of the vote in the 25 constituencies with the highest proportion of students was 25 percentage points higher than its England-wide average; the situation was reversed for the Conservatives, whose share in student areas was 25 percentage points lower.

Similar trends could be seen in Wales and Scotland. In student-dense seats in 2019, Labour’s share of the vote was 16 percentage points above the Welsh average, while the Conservatives’ was 12 percentage points lower.

Even in Scotland, where Labour did worse overall than the Conservatives in the country as a whole, Labour still led by 19.3 percentage points in student-heavy seats. However, the Scottish National Party was the overall front-runner, being the most popular party with students in the three most recent general elections.

The report from Hepi analysed poll results in all 25 parliamentary constituencies in the UK where students made up more than 17.5 per cent of the population at the past four general elections, held in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

In some constituencies, the student vote was overwhelmingly in favour of Labour: in Liverpool Riverside, the party secured 70 per cent of the vote. Nineteen of the 20 student-dense seats in England were won by Labour at the most recent election.

This gap appears to widen with every election: the disparity between student support for Labour compared with England as a whole has risen from 9.9 percentage points in 2010, to 15.5 percentage points in 2015, to 20.7 percentage points in 2017 and 24.5 percentage points in 2019.

A similar downward trend could be seen in student backing for the Conservatives compared with the rest of country – while the vote share in England for the party rose from 39.5 per cent to 47.2 per cent between 2010 to 2019, in the most student-heavy seats it has stagnated between 21.8 per cent and 22.7 per cent for the period.

Taking the 25 student seats for the four past elections, Labour has secured 78 wins of the total of 100 election results – compared with just four for the Conservatives.

Smaller parties tended to perform worse among student populations across the UK. Even those such as the Green Party, thought to be popular with students, typically came nowhere near winning in the English student seats, failing to perform significantly better than others such as Ukip or the Brexit Party.

“There was lots of chatter before the 2019 election about whether students would vote, where they would vote and how they would vote. So we have assessed whether they made a difference,” said Nick Hillman, the director of Hepi and author of the report.

“Our research confirms that student seats lean left, though perhaps to an even greater degree than previously thought.”