Guest blog by Ben Phillips, software debugging and data analysis specialist, with a strong interest in infrastructure politics.

Two days before Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered the November 2025 Budget, The Times published a story about an opinion poll by JL Partners on "HS2" (High Speed 2, a high speed railway line under construction linking Lnodon and the Midlands) under the headline “Half of Britons support scrapping HS2 to plug budget shortfall”. The article did not include basic polling disclosures, such as who commissioned the poll and the exact question wording. It also paraphrased the results into a stronger claim about what voters find “acceptable”. Had this context been provided, readers could have judged the poll’s framing and limitations for themselves. A request to The Times for transparency and corrections was rejected.

The reality is that the poll findings did not support the headline at all, or indeed the rest of the article. As a result, millions of readers and members of the public have been misled about an important issue of public debate.

JL Partners is a member of the British Polling Council, an association of polling organisations, whose website includes important guidance to journalists on the reporting of opinion polls. They suggest 5 key questions a journalist should ask:

1. How and when was the poll conducted?
2. Who was interviewed?
3. How were they chosen?
4. Who sponsored or paid for it?
5. What questions were asked?

The last two questions are critical here. The Times reported the answer to neither. JL Partners publish the data on their website.

The question asked was "Which of the following comes closest to your view of how the government should fill the gap in the budget?"

Respondents were given only three choices: "scrapHS2", "raise taxes", or "don’t know".

The question is a classic false dilemma: it forces a choice between ‘scrap HS2’ and ‘raise taxes’ while excluding other plausible options (such as borrowing for capital investment, reprioritising spending -i.e., reducing expenditure in other areas, phasing commitments, etc), and it ignores that a cancellation would involve substantial costs without any of the economic return. As the article does later state, taxes are not rising to pay for HS2,which makes the question framing even more suspect.

Furthermore, the poll asked which option came “closest” to respondents’ view. The Times paraphrased that into a claim about what people find “acceptable”, which is a different question.

There was also no detail on what “raising taxes” might entail.  This is extremely relevant.  It is possible - if not probable - that many respondents would come to a different view on the appropriateness of raising taxes to pay for HS2, according to how and on whom those taxes were levied.

Knowing who commissioned a poll helps readers judge whether it was neutral measurement or a political communications exercise. Since The Times does not include that information, we learn from JL Partner's website that the poll was commissioned by Knox Digital, a digital communications consultancy that claims "The only thing we care about is making sure your message cuts through and changes minds."

What we don’t know for sure is who commissioned Knox Digital, but related activity around a campaign connected to the publication of the poll provides some clues. An hour after the story was published online by The Times, Richard Tice MP, deputy leader of the Reform UK party, posted a video publicising the poll, urging Rachel Reeves to scrap HS2 "to plug the hole in the budget". The next day, Anne Strickland, researcher for the thinktank, The Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), posted she was filming with “Where’s The Money HS2? (WTM_HS2) and saying it was time to cancel HS2 "once and for all".

WTM_HS2 is a campaign for the cancellation of all of HS2 and associated with Michael Gross, a former Euston landowner involved in a dispute connected to HS2’s compulsory purchase of land in Euston. Michael Gross took HS2 to court and won an out of court settlement.  WTM_HS2 posted several videos on the day with one video of Tom Lubbock of JL Partners discussing the poll with the words “shows conclusively that the majority of Britons would scrap hs2 to fill the budget black hole”. This is not an accurate representation of the poll and it shows how the poll result was presented and amplified as campaign messaging.    

This poll appears to have been designed as part of a strategic campaign, timed to put pressure on ministers in the run-up to the budget and any further statements on rail investment. When a newspaper reports such a poll without clearly stating who paid for it, why it was commissioned, and the exact wording and response options, it deprives readers of the basic context needed to judge what they are reading. A reasonable reader cannot make an informed judgement on credibility and intent.

A complaint to the Times about the lack of transparency and multiple inaccuracies about HS2 was quickly rejected with the following words regarding the poll.

·         "The poll came from JL Partners and was commissioned by Knox Digital. JLP is a respected organisation that is a member of the British Polling Council and follows its guidelines. You do not identify any inaccuracy."

·         "We may report polling as we see fit, as long as we take care to avoid inaccuracy. You do not identify any inaccuracy."

This will not be the first time I have reported The Times to IPSO. The Times reported on the HS2 cost increase of 58 per cent as231 per cent, reflecting a misunderstanding of how the figures were defined and compared. The paper declined to correct the article, offering an explanation that was itself incorrect. IPSO accepted that my calculation was correct, but did not require a correction on the basis that it was fine in the context of the story about overall cost increases. Therefore this significant error remained uncorrected, highlighting the weakness of incentives for accuracy and the limited corrective power of the current regulatory system.

Whilst there have been issues with the delivery of HS2, media reporting around this project and other large infrastructure projects has been beset with inaccuracies, exaggerations of the cost increases and misconceptions. Here, a forced-choice question was presented without the sponsor or wording that would allow readers to judge its limits; it was then paraphrased into a stronger claim about what the public finds “acceptable”; and it circulated as pre-Budget political pressure at the very moment decisions were in play. When that happens, a newspaper is no longer helping the public understand opinion it is attempting to influence it.

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