Whitestone Insight
Whitestone Insight is a British polling and research consultancy set up in 2022 by Andrew Hawkins, one of the UK's most experienced political pollsters and the founder of ComRes. The firm is a specialist research consultancy supporting clients with public policy, marketing and communications, offering public, political and bespoke audience polling alongside qualitative research. Though intentionally small, it carries an outsized pedigree: Hawkins built ComRes into one of Britain's best-known polling brands over sixteen years, and Whitestone's voting intention polls were a fixture of the 2024 general election campaign, conducted for national newspapers. The company is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its disclosure rules. Whitestone Insight Ltd was incorporated on 14 November 2022.
Andrew Hawkins: the founder's track record
Whitestone is, in essence, the second act of Andrew Hawkins's career in polling. A barrister by training, Hawkins had a brief spell in banking, worked for Shell, and passed through public affairs consultancies in Brussels and London before beginning his polling career in the mid-1990s, when his clients included The Sunday Times, The Independent and the Conservative Party. He was campaigns director and then acting chief executive of the London Chamber of Commerce, and head of corporate communications at BT Cellnet, later O2, before founding the polling firm ComRes in 2003. Under Hawkins, ComRes — which became Savanta ComRes after its sale — won numerous industry awards and was recognised as the most accurate pollster in both a general election and a nationwide referendum. Following the sale of ComRes to Next 15 plc in 2019, Hawkins launched Whitestone Insight in 2022 to focus on political, public policy, corporate and faith-sector research.
Why Whitestone was created
The firm's own account of its founding is that it was set up to provide clients with public opinion research and polling which serves the common good. Its stated ethos is to be responsive to clients, imaginative in approach, and enthusiastic about working with organisations that share its desire to see research create positive outcomes. In practice, that means a consultancy model rather than a factory model: Whitestone says its team is intentionally small, partnering with organisations and businesses to deliver research, taking on the heavy lifting of research design and keeping clients informed at every step. The pitch is senior attention — decades of experience across multiple sectors, applied directly — rather than the scale of a large research group.
Services
Whitestone offers three broad kinds of work. First, polling: public, political and bespoke audience surveys, including the voting intention trackers that made its name in the 2024 campaign. Second, qualitative research, designed to sit alongside the numbers and explain the reasoning behind them. Third, strategic support in public policy, marketing and communications, where research findings are translated into decisions for campaigns, companies and causes. The firm's sector experience spans politics and government, corporate clients, media organisations and the faith sector — a specialism reflecting Hawkins's long involvement with Christian media and charities, including board roles in that world during his ComRes years.
The 2024 general election
Whitestone's public profile was established during the 2024 general election, when it conducted regular voting intention polling published in association with the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror — an unusual pairing of titles from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and a demonstration of the firm's non-aligned positioning. Its polls interviewed samples of around 2,000 adults in Great Britain online, weighted to be representative of the adult population; a typical late-campaign survey, fieldwork 1–2 July 2024 with 2,008 respondents, was included in the British Polling Council's final pre-election comparison of pollsters. In that industry-wide assessment, the average error of polling organisations across parties was within two points for each remaining party — the context in which Whitestone's final figures stood alongside those of firms many times its size, barely eighteen months after its launch.
Methodology and standards
Whitestone's published methodology follows British Polling Council norms. Its voting intention releases state the sample size and population — for example, 2,014 GB adults interviewed online between 12 and 13 June 2024 — the fieldwork dates, and the weighting applied to make the data representative of all adults. As a BPC member, the firm must publish full data tables and abide by the council's disclosure rules, and its releases carry the standard requirement that press use be checked with the company, with 48 hours allowed for verification. This transparency matters because the firm's polls enter news coverage directly: a newspaper's election story is only as trustworthy as the methods note underneath it, and Whitestone's compliance with the sector's disclosure regime is part of its product.
Partnerships: JBP and Political Perceptions
Whitestone has also grown through partnerships rather than headcount. The communications agency JBP launched Political Perceptions, a political polling and insight offering, through a strategic partnership with Whitestone, under which JBP's clients gain access to Whitestone's expertise in political, policy and public research. The service provides bespoke polling and perspectives from politicians, business leaders and the general public on topical policy questions, building on JBP's forty-year track record in government affairs from its office in Smith Square, Westminster. For Whitestone, the arrangement embeds its polling inside a larger public affairs offer; for clients, it promises business-critical insight at a time of intense political volatility, when, as JBP put it, decisions cannot be based on guesswork.
Polling in public debate — and its pitfalls
Like every working pollster, Whitestone's research sometimes becomes the story. In 2025, a Whitestone poll of 2,017 British adults on the assisted dying legislation before Parliament was cited by peers opposed to the bill as evidence of public support for their position. The veteran pollster Peter Kellner examined the claim critically, noting that the headline figure rested on excluding "don't know" responses — the raw figures were 45 per cent yes, 20 per cent no and 35 per cent don't know — and that the commissioning campaign organisation had not been named in the original story. Kellner acknowledged the firm's BPC membership, its director's great experience and its adequate sample size, but used the case to warn readers about how poll findings are presented. The episode illustrates the environment Whitestone operates in: its numbers are ammunition in live policy fights, and their presentation is contested accordingly.
Clients and media history
The firm's media credibility rests substantially on Hawkins's earlier client relationships, which its own heritage page lists: ITV News, the BBC, Sky, CNN, The Independent, the Daily Mail and The Mirror are among the political, media, government and corporate clients he has worked with across his career. Whitestone's own election polling for the Express and Mirror continued that pattern, placing its data in front of mass newspaper audiences rather than only in client boardrooms. Its newsletter offers regular commentary and insight from Westminster and beyond, positioning the small team as interpreters of politics as well as measurers of it.
Place in the UK polling landscape
British political polling is dominated by a handful of large firms, but it has always made room for boutiques built around a named pollster — and Whitestone is the clearest recent example. Founded in 2022, BPC-registered, publishing national voting intention polls within two years, and partnering with established public affairs agencies, it has followed the classic boutique trajectory at unusual speed, powered by its founder's prior reputation. For this directory, it belongs among the agencies because its polls are produced for publication: they are commissioned by newspapers, checked against industry standards, and reported as news. Its story is also a reminder that in polling, the asset that matters most is a track record — and Hawkins brought his with him.
At a glance
Whitestone Insight is a UK polling and research consultancy founded in 2022 by Andrew Hawkins, the barrister-turned-pollster who created ComRes in 2003 and sold it to Next 15 in 2019. Based in Britain and listed in this directory under London, the intentionally small firm offers political, public and bespoke polling plus qualitative research for public policy, corporate, media and faith-sector clients, is a member of the British Polling Council, conducted 2024 general election voting intention polls for the Daily Express and Daily Mirror, and partners with JBP on the Political Perceptions service. Its official website is whitestoneinsight.com.
