BBC Newsbeat

People like using polls to make a point about big issues.

Politicians use them in debates, newspapers put them on front pages and people quote them on social media.

It's one reason why some people were shocked when the Conservatives won the general election.

Up until the very last minute David Cameron's Conservatives and Ed Miliband's Labour were predicted neck-and-neck.

Why were they wrong?

In a nutshell, because Labour voters were easier to get hold of than Conservative voters on the telephone and over the internet. Older Conservative voters were harder to contact and one polling company said they didn't have enough younger voters disengaged with politics on their books.

Read more

The 2015 general election result took political pollsters by surprise and a panel of experts has now said that, put simply, their predictions were wrong because they spoke to the wrong people.

But what exactly is polling, how does it work and why is it so hard to get the right answer?

What is a poll?

In a nutshell, it's a scientific survey designed to measure the views of a particular group of people - for example, the UK electorate.

How do they work?

You don't have to eat an entire bowl of soup to know if it tastes good - if it's properly stirred, one spoonful is enough.

That's the analogy most commonly used to explain the principles behind polling - if you ask the right people, they can be relatively small in number but still give you an accurate representation of the views of everyone.  

Read more

The World at One
BBC Radio 4

The head of Migration Advisory Committee has defended its proposal that bosses should pay an annual charge of £1,000 for every skilled worker brought in from outside Europe. Sir David Metcalf told the BBC that businesses could "rest content" with the idea and should regard it as more of grant than a tax that could be reinvested in training. He stressed the £1,000 figure was a recommendation and it would be up to government, if it took up the idea, to set the level and determine what the money could be used for. However, he acknowledged that it would make only a "modest" contribution to reducing overall migration levels. 

Neil Carberry, from the CBI, suggested there were inherent tensions in immigration policy and that many employers were already bumping up against the ceiling for the number of skilled workers they could hire. The UK was increasingly having to choose between hiring "foreign engineers and NHS nurses", he claimed.

"Significant progress" needs to be made in talks between the British Medical Association and the government for doctors to call off industrial action in February, the union's council chair Dr Mark Porter has insisted.

Next Tuesday's 48-hour junior doctors' strike in England was suspended as negotiations continue between the two sides.

However, a planned strike on Wednesday 10 February could still go ahead if the negotiations stall.

The row between junior doctors and ministers is over a new contract.

Dr Porter said junior doctors were always "willing to be there for their patients".

But he told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme: "It's for the government to respond to the concerns of junior doctors about safety," he said.

"We've had some indications there's recognition of this."

The World at One
BBC Radio 4

Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown has said that opinion polls probably "materially affected the outcome of the election". 

"I was seduced by them like everybody else," Mr Ashdown said. 

Speaking to presenter Edward Stourton, the peer said he was "instinctively against" banning opinion polls in the run-up to elections because "the public have a right to know how to use their vote so that they can use it intelligently." 

But he urged polling companies to "get their house in order" and warned that if they do not then "people are going to think about alternatives".  

Image source, Getty Images

Fancy a dual democratic exercise? That may well be coming your way as it looks increasingly likely that the referendum on EU membership will be held in June, not long after the Holyrood elections in May.

Chatting to folk who need to know these things produced the verdict that such an outcome was now "probable", rather than possible.

Plus of course we now have the Secretary of State, David Mundell, saying that there are good reasons for a June electoral test - and, in his view, no germane counter opinions.

A bit more on that emerged from a political debate I chaired at Dundee University last night, hosted by the Students Association.

We had four leaders - Nicola Sturgeon, Kezia Dugdale, Willie Rennie and Patrick Harvie. The role of Ruth Davidson was ably portrayed by Alex Johnstone MSP.

Mr Johnstone suggested that it was vital to hold the EU ballot in June. His argument was that any deal which emerges from EU negotiations in February needs to be banked immediately via a plebiscite. Otherwise it would risk breaking apart.

Incidentally, Mr Johnstone went on to castigate the EU as a "failing" institution - but would not carry that through into arguing at this stage for exit. He indicated, however, that he would require substantive progress from the EU negotiations.

Another factor to the fore, particularly among those of a Conservative persuasion, is the issue of migration. Their fear is that holding off to September risks the poll taking place after a summer in which migrants are seeking to enter the UK in greater numbers. Which, they believe, would increase the Exit vote in the referendum.

Read more from Brian Taylor

Image source, Twitter

Social network Twitter is offline for many users, with web visitors being greeted by an error page.

Some mobile users are also unable to read or post tweets to the network, which has over 300 million active members.

Twitter chose to communicate the problem via a tweet, in which the firm said it was aware of the problem.

Some users took to Facebook to complain.

A spokesman for Twitter said that a tweet from the company's @support account read: "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution."

Read more

Image source, Reuters

The Governor of the Bank of England has ruled out an immediate rise in interest rates because of the turmoil in the global economy and weaker UK growth.

In a gloomy assessment of the state of the world, external, Mark Carney said that collapsing oil prices and an "unforgiving" global environment meant that tighter monetary policy was not yet necessary".

Mr Carney's assessment comes six months after he suggested that a rise in interest rates would come into "sharper relief" at the beginning of 2016.

Many assessed that as a signal that rates would start rising early this year - a relief for savers who have struggled with historically low interest rates since the financial crisis.

Read more

BBC News Channel

The Daily Politics

Ben Bradshaw MP told the Daily Politics the polls “massively affected the strategy of the campaign…and the whole media narrative” of the General Election campaign, but “we don’t know if [the polls] affected the result”.

“We tried to get the debate back on to policy and back onto the prospect of a Conservative government...but it was impossible given the polls.”

He said the campaign was “dominated by speculation about a hung parliament not about the prospect of a majority Conservative government”.  

Bradshaw said there was a “conspiracy of silence” between the “commentariat in the media” and the pollsters, and recommended media organisations should commission fewer polls but spend more to get greater accuracy in their results.

Bradshaw said he wouldn’t trust polls until more money is spent on them; “We have to basically acknowledge in the Labour Party… that we are six points worse than the current polling is suggesting.”

The Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced that he plans to change the law to limit exit charges for people who want to take money out of their pension pot.

Last July the government launched a consultation exercise on proposals to cap pension exit fees.

Mr Osborne told the Commons that 700,000 people faced some form of early exit charge and said, "the government isn't prepared to stand by and see people either being ripped off or blocked from accessing their own money by excessive charges".

The chancellor said the law would be changed to give the Financial Conduct Authority a duty to cap excessive early exit charges.

He added: "We're determined that people who've done the right thing, saved responsibly, are able to access their pensions fairly."

House of Commons
Parliament

The Speaker calls Conservative Robert Jenrick to ask a question, even though he appears to be leaving the chamber.

The MP for Newark says he was leaving because his question had already been asked but "I'll ask it again, that's not unusual in this place". He becomes the second MP to ask the Chancellor to back the closed Thoresby Colliery as an enterprise zone.

George Osborne tells Robert Jenrick that he'd "love to get it into a position" where it could become one, "as I told the member for Sherwood."

Speaker John Bercow notes that repetition "is not a novel phenomenon" in the Commons.