DeltaPoll’s latest survey has Labour and Reform level at 28% each, with the Conservatives well back on 18%. A month ago, in the same company’s June poll, Labour sat at just 20%, eight points behind Farage’s party. That gap has now vanished entirely.
What makes this particularly striking is that Reform hasn’t actually lost any ground, it’s still on 28%, exactly where it was. Labour’s recovery hasn’t come from Reform collapsing. It’s come from somewhere else: voters who’d walked away from Labour under Starmer apparently deciding to give the party a second look now that the leader has changed.
This is the clearest sign yet of an early Burnham bounce. Whether it’s a real, lasting shift or just the usual bump every new PM gets for a few weeks won’t be clear until several more polls come in over a longer stretch.
The full breakdown
Labour and Reform sit level on 28%, the Conservatives on 18%, the Lib Dems and Greens tied at 10%, the SNP on 3%, Plaid Cymru on 1%, and everyone else sharing 2%.
Against DeltaPoll’s previous survey: Labour up eight, the Conservatives up one, Reform and the SNP unchanged, the Lib Dems down two, the Greens down three, others down two.
Fieldwork ran from 17 to 20 July, right through the final stages of the Labour leadership handover and Burnham’s confirmation, but mostly before any of his big policy announcements as PM actually landed. That timing matters. This looks much more like enthusiasm for Burnham personally, plus relief that Starmer’s gone, than any considered judgment on the new government’s actual record. It’s also worth noting that a fair chunk of Labour’s gain seems to have come from the Greens, Lib Dems and smaller parties rather than pulled directly from Reform.
Why Labour’s numbers moved
Starmer left office with dreadful personal ratings, unable to convince a lot of Labour’s own 2024 voters to stick with the party. Despite that huge majority at the last election, support fractured fast afterwards. Reform picked up people who felt nothing had actually changed; the Greens and Lib Dems picked up disillusioned progressives.
Burnham took over a party still dominant in the Commons but trailing Reform in most national polling. His arrival changed the conversation almost immediately, he came in with stronger personal approval than any of the other party leaders, his record running Greater Manchester gave him credibility, and his willingness to put some distance between himself and parts of Starmer’s government let Labour genuinely sell this as a reset rather than a reshuffle.
The DeltaPoll numbers suggest that’s worked, at least for now. An eight-point jump from a single pollster is too big to just shrug off as noise. But it still needs treating carefully. New leaders almost always get a short honeymoon bump while people pay attention to the new face and temporarily forget why they were annoyed at the old government. The real test is whether these voters are still around once the novelty wears off and the actual hard decisions start.
A second pollster shows a similar, smaller shift
DeltaPoll isn’t alone here, though other pollsters have Reform, Labour and the Tories bunched much closer together. YouGov’s latest has Reform on 23%, with Labour and the Conservatives both on 21%. Compared to the week before: Reform down one, the Conservatives up two, Labour up one.
So Reform’s still ahead, but only by two points, and all three biggest parties now sit close enough together that the gaps could just be normal polling noise. Different companies use different methods for likely-voter modelling, undecided respondents, weighting, all of it, so it’s never sensible to treat one poll as gospel. But the direction across both surveys is becoming hard to ignore: Reform’s big lead has shrunk, Labour’s showing genuine signs of life post-Starmer, and the Conservatives have ticked up slightly too, suggesting this might be turning into a genuinely fragmented three-way contest rather than a straight Burnham-versus-Farage fight.
Burnham wants a ‘cost-of-living government’
The poll bump landed right as Burnham ran his first Cabinet meeting and told ministers to make cutting household pressure the priority in every department. He wants Labour to be known as a “cost-of-living government,” he said, and wants departments looking at measures of any size that give people some sense help is actually coming.
“What can we do just to take that little bit of pressure off people’s shoulders?” he asked his Cabinet.
That’s clearly the lesson Labour’s taken from watching Starmer sink: voters kept saying they didn’t feel any better off, whatever the economic data claimed. Burnham is trying to tie his premiership to things people can actually feel in their own weekly budget.
What’s already been announced
VAT is coming off household electricity bills from 1 October. Treasury estimates put the saving at around £45 a year for a typical household, cutting the rate from 5% to zero. It’s being funded in year one by scrapping Starmer’s planned £1.8bn digital ID scheme, though that raises the obvious question of how the tax cut gets paid for once those one-off savings run dry. Chancellor John Healey says the immediate cost is covered but hasn’t laid out a full long-term plan yet.
A £2 cap on single bus fares is expected too, taking a policy closely associated with Burnham’s time in Manchester and rolling it out nationally. There’s also a planned 20% cut in business rates for hospitality venues, and £340m announced as the first stage of a plan to end long-term rough sleeping.
None of these individually will transform anyone’s finances. The point is cumulative: show, quickly, that a change of leader has actually produced decisions people can see and understand. Whether they’re ambitious enough, well-targeted, or properly funded long-term is going to get a lot more scrutiny in the coming months.
Farage wants another election
Farage’s response to Burnham’s arrival was to demand an immediate general election. “This man has no mandate whatsoever,” he said. “He didn’t stand on the 2024 general election manifesto. You cannot make the ‘biggest changes’ in British politics in 40 years without a mandate from the British people.” He said it would be “decent, right and proper” for Burnham to put his programme to voters directly.
There’s no constitutional obligation for a new PM to do that. Britain elects MPs, not prime ministers directly, and a governing party can swap leaders mid-term while keeping its existing mandate. Burnham himself entered the Commons by winning the Makerfield byelection before taking the Labour leadership, but Farage’s argument is that nobody voted for either him or his current programme back in 2024.
It’s not an argument Reform has always applied consistently. Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all walked into Downing Street without a fresh general election. Farage has called for elections at some past leadership changes and not others, though he’s been consistent about demanding one throughout Labour’s current turmoil.
Reform’s own problems
The pressure on Reform isn’t only about a more popular Labour leader turning up. Farage has spent months fielding questions over a £5m gift from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman with major crypto interests. He never declared it in his parliamentary register, insisting it was personal, unconditional, and had nothing to do with his political role.
A standards investigation into whether it should have been registered was opened, then paused when Farage resigned as Clacton’s MP to force a byelection, and can resume once that’s decided. Farage denies any wrongdoing and says the byelection lets voters judge him directly.
Reform’s support held steady in the DeltaPoll survey despite all this. But Farage’s own personal ratings have softened, and Reform is no longer up against a Labour government led by someone as unpopular as Starmer had become.
A bounce isn’t a recovery
Labour will be pleased with this, understandably. Going from eight points down to level in a month is a real shift, especially for a governing party that had looked like it was bleeding support in multiple directions at once.
Burnham’s personal popularity has given wavering Labour voters a reason to look again. His early focus on bills, transport and housing is designed to keep them looking. But one good poll doesn’t mean Labour’s underlying problems are fixed. Burnham still has to navigate spending, tax, welfare and borrowing decisions that will test all these early promises against actual Treasury constraints, and the expectations built up by such a rapid rise could easily turn into a liability if improvements take longer to show than people are hoping.
For now, though, Labour has something it’s lacked for most of the past year: actual momentum. Reform’s lead has disappeared entirely in one poll and shrunk sharply in another. The question now is whether this is just the standard welcome new PMs get, or the start of something that actually holds.
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Jordon Scott is a digital media specialist and editor at The Daily Britain. He focuses on political coverage, platform strategy, and ensuring journalism remains accessible without compromising editorial standards.
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