5654 & Company’s sixth annual Hope Index – which studies how hopeful the UK public feel about their lives, their community and the country and was launched today – reveals the divide between “the hopeful” and “the pessimists” within the UK public, and how this has begun to emerge along party political lines in the last year.

Over the last five years we have been tracking levels of hope across the UK. We believe this is an important topic to study because it helps us understand how the underlying mood of the public is changing over time. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, we have seen the nation’s mood swing from hopeful to uncertain as we’ve lived though the arrival and ending of the pandemic, a rolling cost-of-living crisis and multiple Prime Ministers and Governments struggling to seize the agenda and lead.