Verian

Verian is a London-based research and advisory group specialising in public policy and public sector research, providing the social research, evaluation and polling that governments, public bodies and news organisations rely on to understand citizens. It traded for seven years as Kantar Public, the public-policy arm of the Kantar group, before being sold to the private equity firm Trilantic Europe in September 2022 and relaunched under the Verian name in November 2023. In the United Kingdom its best-known public work is political polling: it is a member of the British Polling Council, publishes voting intention and public attitude surveys with full methods and tables, and its findings on everything from the economy to adult social care are reported across the national media. Behind the headlines sits a larger business — research and communications advice for the public sector across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the United States.

From Kantar Public to Verian

Verian's lineage runs through Kantar Public, which operated as a division of Kantar, one of the world's largest data and marketing groups, for seven years. In September 2022 the business was divested from the Kantar Group and sold to Trilantic Europe, a private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum. Eric Salama, formerly Kantar's chief executive, joined the separated business as global chair at the time of the sale. Independence required a new identity, and on 9 November 2023 Kantar Public rebranded as Verian with immediate effect, across all its operating markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US. The company explained that the name combines Latin roots evoking truth and the qualities of something — a deliberate signal, for a research firm, that evidence is the product. Dr Michelle Harrison, who led the business as global chief executive through the transition, presented the launch as the start of an independent phase focused on the next generation of public policy challenges.

What Verian does

Verian describes itself as a research and advisory firm for government and the public sector. Its work spans the full cycle of policy: understanding public behaviour and attitudes before decisions are taken, designing and testing communications and interventions, tracking delivery, and evaluating outcomes afterwards. That includes large-scale social surveys, qualitative and deliberative research with citizens, behavioural research, data analytics, and strategic communications advice. Clients are primarily public institutions — government departments and agencies, regulators, public bodies and international organisations — along with the media organisations that commission its polling. The through-line is evidence for decisions that affect whole populations, where the cost of misunderstanding the public is measured in failed services and wasted expenditure.

Political polling and the media

In Britain, Verian is most visible as a pollster. Its surveys of voting intention and public opinion are conducted to British Polling Council rules, with methods and data tables published openly on its website — the practice that allows journalists and rival researchers to interrogate the findings. Its polling files show the craft in detail: samples of well over a thousand adults across Great Britain, weighted and broken down by gender, age band and past vote, examining questions from the state of the economy to how people expect to pay for social care. Broadcasters abroad commission the same expertise — in New Zealand, the long-running 1 News poll continued under the Verian name after the rebrand, having previously carried the Kantar Public brand. Each published poll is both a news product and a demonstration of method, which is why pollsters guard their accuracy so jealously.

The 2024 general election and after

General elections are polling's public examination, and Verian submitted to the scrutiny openly. Following the 2024 UK general election, the company published a detailed reflection for the British Polling Council comparing its final published figures with the result, analysing weighting and adjustments, and testing its own assumptions against what voters actually did. It recontacted respondents from its final pre-election poll — obtaining follow-up data for nearly 1,500 of them — to check whether its turnout model predicted who voted, and whether late changes of mind had occurred. Its analysis found a strong relationship between its estimated voting probability and reported turnout, and no evidence of a late swing specifically away from Labour among its respondents. Publishing that kind of self-audit is how serious pollsters maintain credibility with the media clients who stake their own reputations on the numbers.

Public Voice and research infrastructure

Verian's UK polling draws on standing research infrastructure, including its Public Voice panel — the recruited body of respondents it returns to across studies. Panel infrastructure matters because modern social research is longitudinal: the same citizens may be surveyed before an election, recontacted afterwards to validate their behaviour, and sampled again for studies on public services, the economy or care. Maintaining such panels, with robust sampling, weighting and imputation methods, is the invisible capital of a research firm. Verian's published methodological documents — weighting schemes, turnout modelling, treatment of don't-knows — show an operation built to professional standards and accustomed to external inspection by academic and industry reviewers.

Social research beyond elections

Headline voting polls are a small part of the output. Verian's substantive research addresses the questions public services face: how people experience adult social care and who they believe should provide and fund it; how the public judges the economy now and in the year ahead; how attitudes divide by age, region and political allegiance. Its published tables on social care, for example, explore comfort in discussing future care needs with family, expectations about costs, and differences between those already receiving care, those supporting relatives, and those with no experience of the system. Research of this kind feeds directly into policy formation and into journalism: a minister designing a care reform and an editor commissioning coverage both start from what the public actually thinks, which firms like Verian exist to measure.

Markets and organisation

Verian is an international group operating across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the United States, with London as its home base in the directory's terms and the UK among its principal markets. The rebrand applied simultaneously across all operating markets, underscoring that the business sees itself as one firm rather than a federation of national agencies. Its leadership combines research and commercial pedigree: a global chief executive drawn from the research business itself, and a chair in Eric Salama whose career spans the leadership of Kantar. Ownership by Trilantic Europe places it among the growing class of private-equity-backed professional services firms built out of former divisions of large groups, expected to grow as an independent specialist rather than as one practice among many inside a conglomerate.

Standards and memberships

Trust is the currency of polling, and Verian operates within the profession's formal frameworks. It is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules, which require transparency about methods, funders and data — the standard the UK media uses to distinguish credible pollsters. Its election post-mortems and published tables are part of that compliance culture. As a social research firm it also works within the wider professional standards of the market and social research industry, where question wording, sampling and disclosure determine whether findings can bear the weight placed on them. For a firm whose product is, literally, claims about what millions of people think, these disciplines are not decoration; they are the business model.

Why news organisations use Verian

For editors, a pollster is a source of exclusive, quantifiable news: public reaction to a budget, a party's standing, a policy's popularity, each expressed in numbers that can anchor coverage and be tracked over time. Verian's combination of council-standard methods, an established panel, and a public-sector specialism makes its surveys commissionable and citable across the media — and its research is in fact reported across UK outlets, as the batch of public attitude studies it publishes would suggest. For the wider public, most encounters with Verian are invisible: its name in the small print of a poll story, its data shaping a policy announcement. That combination of public visibility in polling and private influence in policy research is precisely the position the firm occupies.

Verian's significance

Verian's story is part of a larger reshaping of the research industry, in which public-policy specialists once housed inside giant marketing groups are becoming independent firms. Its seven years as Kantar Public gave it scale and method; independence under Trilantic, sealed by the 2023 rebrand, gave it a single-minded focus on government and public policy work. From voting intention polls scrutinised after a general election to long studies of how Britain thinks about care, the economy and public services, the firm produces much of the evidence through which the country describes itself to itself — which is why a research agency belongs in a directory of news sources.