New poll forecasts Labour will be the biggest party in May – with 20 more seats than the Tories

Polling Observatory – a polling team made up of academics over at the New Statesman’s election site, May2015 – has released their first set of forecasts and it’s relatively good news for Labour.

Looking at national, Scottish and constituency polling, they’ve forecast that Labour will be the biggest party in May – with 20 more seats than the Conservatives. This seems to suggest the opposite from other polling released recently.

This set of polling, however, does hold a similarly bad outcome for Labour in Scotland as others have. They have predicted Labour will lose more than 30 of their 40 seats to the SNP.

They have also said that Labour and the SNP will have a greater number of combined seats than the Tories and the Lib Dems.

The polling reads as follows – the numbers in brackets represent the upper and lower estimates for each party:

Labour — 285 (260-313)
Tories — 265 (235-293)
SNP — 49 (34-56)
Lib Dem — 24 (17-33)
Ukip — 3 (1-5)
Others — 6 (4-9)

While they’ve said that there’s a 77% chance Labour will be the largest party, they’ve also calculated that the chances of Labour winning a majority is less than 0.5%.