Public First
Public First is a London-based research, polling and policy agency that studies public opinion and turns it into advice for governments, companies, campaigns and charities. From its registered address at 40 Villiers Street in central London, the firm runs focus groups, quantitative polling and in-depth policy research on questions ranging from education and health to technology and the cost of living. Its findings are frequently reported in the national media, and its senior figures are familiar voices in Westminster debate. The agency was set up by Rachel Wolf and James Frayne, both of whom had previously worked with the Conservative minister Michael Gove, and it has grown into one of the most politically connected research firms in Britain — a status that has brought it both high-profile commissions and public controversy.
Founders and background
Rachel Wolf, a founding partner of Public First, is a former adviser to Michael Gove and was a co-author of the Conservative Party's 2019 general election manifesto — an unusually direct route from research into the heart of government policymaking. James Frayne, her co-founder, served as director of communications at the Department for Education when Gove was education secretary and Dominic Cummings was his political adviser; his association with Cummings stretched back some two decades to Eurosceptic campaigning. Frayne is also the author of Meet the People, a guide to understanding and moving public opinion, and has written regularly on English public attitudes for outlets such as ConservativeHome. Together, the founders gave the young agency an insider's understanding of how ministers think, how manifestos are built and how public opinion constrains both.
What Public First does
The agency's work falls into three broad strands. The first is opinion research: nationally representative polling and qualitative work, especially focus groups, designed to explore not just what the public thinks but why. The second is policy development — using that research, alongside desk analysis, to design programmes that can survive contact with voters and Parliament. The third is strategic advice and communications, helping clients frame arguments in language that resonates beyond Westminster. Its published practice areas include education and social policy, where it has built a substantial body of work on schools, universities and international students, and it regularly conducts polling for sector bodies: in 2026, for example, it carried out the fieldwork for techUK's report on the state of UK technology, surveying business decision-makers in both technology and non-technology firms and weighting the results using iterative proportional fitting.
Focus groups and the public mood
Public First is particularly associated with focus group research — the small, moderated discussions that reveal the vocabulary voters actually use about an issue. During election campaigns and periods of national crisis, such groups are among the most valued forms of intelligence in politics, because they surface concerns before they register in headline polling. The agency's partners write and broadcast about what they hear in these groups, and its research on the concerns of voters in England's towns has fed into wider debates about levelling up, public services and cultural change. For media organisations, the firm's value lies in this translation work: it converts raw opinion into narratives that explain, for instance, why a policy that polls well in the abstract can fail when voters hear its details.
The Covid-19 contract and the High Court ruling
Public First became a national news story in its own right during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of February 2020 it began running focus groups on the government's pandemic policy and communications; a formal Cabinet Office contract followed, signed off on 2 June 2020, backdated to 3 March, with a maximum value of £840,000 over six months. In the event, £564,393.67 was paid. The contract had not been competitively tendered, and the Good Law Project challenged it by judicial review. In June 2021 the High Court ruled that the decision to award the contract had given rise to apparent bias and was therefore unlawful: Justice O'Farrell held that a fair-minded observer, noting the government's failure to consider any other agency's experience, expertise, availability or capacity, could conclude there was a real possibility of bias. The court accepted that the government had been entitled to act with extreme urgency, and the judgement made no criticism of Public First itself; the firm said it was proud of its pandemic work and that weak internal government processes had created the appearance of bias. Reporting also linked the firm to work for the exams regulator Ofqual during the 2020 A-levels crisis and to a further untendered contract connected to health service reorganisation.
Education and international students
One of the agency's most developed specialisms is education policy. Its education and social policy practice publishes research on schools, skills, universities and student migration, and its staff are regular speakers at sector conferences; in July 2024, for example, its researcher Jess Lister discussed the incoming Labour government's higher education and immigration challenges at the BUILA conference of international education professionals, in coverage by The PIE News, the sector's trade outlet. This strand of work illustrates the firm's model: deep familiarity with a policy community, polling that tests how proposals land with the wider public, and analysis aimed at officials who must reconcile the two.
People and presence in Westminster
The firm's integration into the policy world extends to personnel movement. During the pandemic contract, a Public First partner, Gabriel Milland, was seconded into Downing Street to support communications work, and Cabinet Office answers in Parliament confirmed that the agency met civil servants to report focus group findings and provided on-site resource to Number 10. Wolf remains a visible participant in policy debate, appearing on panels about the future of the British state alongside former Downing Street and Liberal Democrat policy chiefs. Such proximity is the agency's selling point and its reputational risk in equal measure: clients buy access to people who understand government from the inside, while critics question whether that closeness is healthy for public procurement.
How its research reaches the news
Although much of Public First's work is private, its published polling and reports are designed for public consumption and are regularly picked up by newspapers and broadcasters. A typical project pairs a client with a question — how businesses view technology policy, how parents judge school standards, how voters in particular regions weigh competing priorities — and presents the findings with the agency's own interpretive commentary. Because the founders write fluently about their results, the firm's research often arrives in the media pre-packaged with an argument about what it means, which is one reason its name appears in news stories rather than remaining in the small print of methodology notes.
Methods and standards
The agency's published work describes conventional, defensible techniques: defined samples of specified populations, stated fieldwork dates, and weighting — including raking, or iterative proportional fitting — to align samples with known population profiles. Its qualitative work follows the standard logic of focus group research, using moderated discussion to explore reasoning rather than measure prevalence, and its reports generally distinguish between the two kinds of evidence. In an industry where the credibility of a finding depends on transparent method, the firm's published notes follow the norms expected by the British research sector.
Criticism and scrutiny
Scrutiny of Public First has focused less on its research quality than on its relationships. Opposition politicians described the pattern of untendered pandemic contracts to politically connected firms as a "chumocracy", and transparency campaigners used the case to press for stronger procurement rules; the National Audit Office's wider criticism of pandemic procurement — lack of transparency and unexplained supplier selection — formed the backdrop to the litigation. The agency's consistent response has been that its work was needed urgently, was delivered, and was not faulted by the court. The episode nonetheless fixed Public First in the public record as an example in the debate about how government buys research in emergencies.
Place in the UK research landscape
Public First sits at the junction of three trades — polling, policy consultancy and communications — that larger groups usually keep in separate divisions. Its competitors range from big research houses to think tanks and public affairs firms, but few combine manifesto-writing experience with an active polling operation and a publishing presence. For this directory, it belongs among the agencies because its research is a regular input into national news coverage: its polls are commissioned, reported and argued over in the media, and its partners are quoted as interpreters of the public mood. That dual role — supplier of data and participant in debate — defines the firm.
At a glance
Public First is a London research and opinion agency founded by Rachel Wolf and James Frayne, former associates of Michael Gove; Wolf co-wrote the 2019 Conservative manifesto. It conducts polling, focus groups and policy research, with recognised strengths in education and social policy, from offices at 40 Villiers Street, London. It is best known publicly for its Covid-19 focus group contract for the Cabinet Office, ruled unlawfully awarded by the High Court in 2021 on apparent-bias grounds, with no criticism made of the firm itself. Its official website is publicfirst.co.uk.
