The 2024 UK General Election result by age group

Five years ago I drew a diagram to illustrate why age was such an important factor in determining the result of the previous, 2019, UK General Election. It was first shown in Public Sector Focus and contained 66 squares. Each square represented one million people living in the UK. At that time, there were about 66 million people resident in the UK. Some 20 million were adults who chose not to vote, or were eligible to vote but had not registered to (and so could not vote even if they had wanted to). Apathy was quite high in 2019; much higher than it had been in 2017.

The Conservatives won that election because, to the nearest million, 14 million adults chose to vote for them. As Figure 1 shows, most of those who did were old or very old.

The next largest group of people in the UK were 12 million children who were also UK citizens. They include more than a million 16 and 17 year olds who, one day, may be allowed to vote. Labour came fourth in 2019, after the non-voters, the Conservatives and the children, with 10 million votes. It was an impressive tally, but the votes were in the wrong places and too spread out over the age groups so the Labour party won only 203 seats in the House of Commons. Voters tend to concentrate in places by age and so, if you secure a great many votes of a particular age group, you can win more seats.

The fifth largest group were the Liberals, the sixth were people who were not UK, Irish or ‘qualifying’ Commonwealth/EU citizens and so could not vote, and the three remaining groups only secured, to the nearest million, one million votes each.

Figure 1: The 2019 UK General Election, voting by age

Figure 1: The 2019 UK General Election, voting by age

The 2019 General Election was, above all, an election about age. The old won it. More of them turned out, and their votes tended to be geographically concentrated in areas where people retire to. This included many of the red wall seats which were usually in slightly more affluent parts of the north of England to which people were, in increasing numbers, retiring.

So, you may be wondering, how did the picture change in the subsequent five years when we look again at voting by age in exactly the same way? To answer this, I have redrawn the diagram to show the 2024 UK General Election result below, in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The 2024 UK General Election, voting by age

Figure 2: The 2024 UK General Election, voting by age

The first point to note about Figure 2 is that the age groups no longer contain almost exactly the same numbers of people. We have had fewer babies in the last five years and so the age group 0-6 now has only around 5.5 million members, not 6 million. However, a little net positive immigration and some ageing means that the older age groups all tend to now contain 6.5 million people rather than 6 million. This is not the case for the age group 23-28, a great many of whom left during the pandemic and because of Brexit and never came back. Similarly, the age group 65-73 has not grown in size because of few births after the post-world-war-two baby boom (they were born later, in the 1950s). Overall, though, there has been less emigration of families with children – emigration became harder after Brexit. Our adult population has grown by two million, and most of that is of people aged over 29 (see Table 2). This is because of ageing and less emigration. But what is most interesting in Figure 2 is not our changing demographics, but how our voting patterns have changed.

The greatest change is that three million fewer people chose to vote in 2024 as compared to 2019. There was a huge growth in apathy. In every single age group, apart from people aged 65+, more adults chose not to vote than to vote for any political party. At age 65+ a majority still chose to vote for the Conservatives, but that was a depleted majority (see Table 1). The Conservatives lost to apathy, and to a new alternative being offered to them. That new alternative was not Labour, even though Labour was presenting a very conservative ‘offer’.

The Labour vote actually fell between 2019 and 2024. It fell most amongst the young and overall, despite increasing a little among those aged 57-64. One result was that Labour now had a similar level of support across the whole age range. In normal times this would not be an effective way of wining seats; but the 2024 General Election was not normal. What made the election abnormal was a re-branded Brexit Party standing as ‘Reform UK’ in almost every seat in the mainland of the UK. This party took almost 4 million votes, mainly off the Tories, who lost another 3 million to people no longer voting (net). The result was to hand Labour a 411 seat majority – despite Labour wining fewer votes than it had in 2019!

The Liberal vote was also slightly lower in 2024. To the nearest million the Liberals won as many votes in 2024 as they had in 2019; but now were rewarded with 72 seats rather than just 11. That is how the UK voting system works. It would be wrong to label the UK a ‘democracy’. There is only a very weak relationship between votes and seats. I’ll leave you to study the other differences between these Figure 1 and 2 that summarise the results; but note how fractured the age 23-28 vote has become by political choices. Also note that the very small parties have to be placed somewhere in the diagram. I have tried to place them where I placed them before, but I have aged those who cannot vote by five years (and an extra million of that group have arrived – net). Brexit did not reduce immigration.

If you want to know how Figure 2 was constructed, the Table below is of the IPSOS estimates of voters turnout and voting by age. Note that this is based on a survey of ‘17,394 GB adults aged 18+, of whom 15,206 said they voted, interviewed on the online random probability Ipsos Knowledge Panel between 5-8 July 2024. The data was weighted using our normal methodology to be representative of the adult population profile of Great Britain, and then the proportions of voters for each party and non-voters were weighted to the actual results by region.’[1] IPPR research helped confirm the Ipsos findings.[2]

The figures in Table 1 were used alongside the overall party vote totals and population estimates to create the revised 2019 figure into its 2024 form. The projected population of the UK in mid-year 2024 was 69.025 million.[3] So three million more than what we thought the population was in 2019. Of those 28.809 million voted.[4] Just 59.8% of the 48 million people registered to vote. So, to the nearest million, 40 million people did not vote or were not registered to vote. Of that 40 million, 14 million were children, leaving 26 million adults who did not vote. Of those adults who did not vote, 20 million chose not, another 6 million were not registered to vote or were not permitted to register to vote. It is extremely hard to determine who does qualify to vote in the UK.[5]

Table 1: proportion of people in each of 6 age groups by UK vote in 2024

Source: Ipsos survey held 5-8 July 2024 and weighted to fit regional totals.

The final table here shows the population change in the UK by age for those interested in what has happened and where we are heading in terms of how many of us there are, and who will be voting at the next General Election.

The first column in Table 2 shows how each population group has changed in size compared to its numbers five year earlier. Thus, there are 1% fewer children aged 5-9 in the UK in 2024 than the numbers aged 0-4 in 2019. Deaths and net-migration are the only possible reasons. The age group that has grown the most are those aged 20-24 in 2024, by 16%; that has to be due to net in-migration. If you follow the first column of Figures in Table 2 down, you will note that the first fall is for ages 55-59. This is when deaths begin to take their toll. Follow the column down to its end and you will see that 88% of those aged 95-99 in 2019 did not make it to be 100+ in 2024.

The second column in Table 2 is the absolute number of people the percentages in the first column refer to, in thousands. The third and fourth columns are the ONS estimates and projections for the population of the UK by age in 2019 and 2024. Note that the total population estimate for 2019 is now thought to have been 66.8 million (nearer to 67). The fifth and sixth columns are the change when we just compare the age groups directly. There were 366,000 fewer children aged 0-4 in the UK in 2024 than in 2019, a 9% fall. This is greater than the 8% fall in the numbers age 5-9 in 2024. Our primary schools are going to struggle in future, then our secondary schools. We will be an even older population at the time of the next General Election, despite the continued immigration we benefit from. The final row in Table 2 shows that we grew in total population size by 3% in these five years. Without immigration we would already be a shrinking island. And, already, the 25-29 age group are fewer in number than those who were of those ages in 2019. Our future will depend as much on who comes and who goes, as on how we vote and if we ever manage to make voting fair.

Table 2: Population estimates and projections by the Office for National Statistics,
United Kingdom (UK), PERSONS, thousands, 2019, 2024, and change by age group

Source: ONS Principal projections 2024, and 2018-based projections for 2019.

References
[1] Gideon Skinner, Keiran Pedley, Cameron Garrett, Ben Roff Public Affairs (2024) How Britain voted in the 2024 election, London: Ipsos, https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-election

[2] Parth Patel and Viktor Valgarðsson (2024) Half of us: Turnout patterns at the 2024 general election, London: Ippr, July, https://ippr-org.files.svdcdn.com/production/Downloads/Half_of_us_July24_2024-07-12-105904_eioz.pdf

[3] James Robards (2024) Principal projection – UK population in age groups, London: ONS, 30 January, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationprojections/datasets/tablea21principalprojectionukpopulationinagegroups

[4] Richard Cracknell and Carl Baker (2024) General election 2024 results , Research Briefing, London: House of Commons Library, 18 July, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-10009/CBP-10009.pdf

[5] The number was 7 million in England and Wales in April 2024, a million extra registered: Craig Westwood (2024) Millions of missing voters urged to register before deadline, London: The Electoral Commission, 9 April, https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/media-centre/millions-missing-voters-urged-register-deadline

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