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A record share of people in the UK say taxes and public spending should be cut, according to a leading survey that highlights a widening political divide.

The latest British Social Attitudes report, published on Tuesday by the National Center for Social Research, showed that 19 percent of people said taxes and spending should be cut, the highest since comparable data first became available in 1983, and more than three times the all-time average of 6 percent.

Alex Scholes, director of research at the National Center for Social Research, said: “The latest survey is the first clear indication that the public is starting to react against the expansion of the state that we have witnessed after Covid.”

UK public debt has risen from 80 percent of GDP in the fiscal year of 2019 to 94 percent in 2024, the highest since the early 1960s, reflecting high spending during the pandemic.

The Labor government announced £26bn in tax increases last year, following a £40bn tax increase in the 2024 Budget, raising the total burden to a record high 38 per cent of GDP by the end of parliament.

Support for more spending on welfare benefits for the poor fell to 27 percent, which corresponds to the lowest level ever recorded, according to the report, which was based on 4,680 interviews between August 26 and October 6 last year, ahead of the November budget.

Scholes noted that divisions between different groups of voters on tax and spending, among others, such as immigration, “have only become more pronounced”.

In 2025, 29 percent of Conservative and Reform supporters favor cutting taxes and spending, compared to a 10 percent average for Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green supporters. This 19 percentage point gap is greater than the 5 percentage point difference in 2022 and the 3 percentage point gap in 2010.

The political divide has widened even on immigration, with 57 percent of supporters of the Conservatives, Reform or the UK Independence Party saying immigration is bad for the economy, compared to 13 percent of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green supporters.

The numbers show that, on taxation and immigration, “identifying a policy that will be popular with the majority is difficult at the moment,” said John Curtice, senior research fellow at NatCen.

In general, public attitudes toward immigration have become more skeptical after recent record levels of migration, but remain less negative than a decade ago.

Net migration surged after Brexit to a peak of 944,000 people in the year to March 2023, but there strongly refused since then.

The public is “reacting to the massive expansion of immigration,” Curtice said, “but they’re not necessarily antagonistic” as they were in the early 2010s.

The findings come as a separate analysis on Tuesday by the Resolution Foundation showed that growth in disposable income for working-age families in the poorest half of Britain will slow slightly in the 2020s.

The think-tank estimates that with incomes set to grow just 0.5 percent annually in the 2020s, it will take 137 years for low-income families to see the doubling of living standards previously enjoyed every 40 years.

Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, said: “The stagnation of disposable income means that many families’ hopes of home ownership have disappeared and work is not a guaranteed route out of poverty.”