About the UK Election Data Vault
The Project
The UK Election Data Vault is a non-profit initiative to bring together robust and reliable data on elections to the UK House of Commons. The project was launched in 2023 but the vault itself reflects many years of planning and development.
The vault contains data on election results, polling, political geography and macroeconomic measures. The data itself is held in a relational database that is designed to ensure comparability between all the different types of data. All of the data you see on the site is drawn directly from our database.
The data has been brought together from a variety of public sources. It has been subjected to substantial cleaning and standardisation to produce a robust product.
The analysis presented on our site is aimed at helping anyone interested in analysing UK election data. We aim to give a long term perspective and explain clearly what is known and what is uncertain.
The most important thing is that all our data is freely available for anyone to use for commercial or any other purpose.
The Director
The director of the project is Bruce Golding. He is a Chartered Statistician with 15 years of experience working in government and international organisations. He has worked in a wide range of policy areas including finance, education, strategy and rural affairs. He has worked on many major national and international surveys. His primary expertise are in the collection, analysis and dissemination of social and economic statistics.
You can contact him at bruce.golding@electiondatavault.co.uk.
Current products
In the early days of this project, we have focused on collating and standardising data for future analysis. This is why you can find a collection of tables showing general election results since 1955, local election composition since 1973, polling since 1943 and macroeconomic measures since 1955. There are also lookup tables to match wards to constituencies to ceremonial counties to regions and nations.
We have then tried to summarise the high level results and provide some regional analysis . We have also developed pollster ratings which we use to weight our polling average.
In advance of the general election we have developed an election forecast model. Our general view is that much analysis of the election has been too certain and we want to show that there is considerable uncertainty in the results. We have also collated a candidate database for the election.
Future Products
We intend to develop the database further by adding more years of data to give an even longer perspective. We also intend to make the database easier to access for users but we are yet to explore how we will do this.
If you have any suggestions then please get in touch.