CityAM: When is a Nimby not a Nimby?

A version of this opinion piece was published in CityAM on 11 April 2024

Everyone involved in planning has seen this movie before. On the one hand, a motivated minority of local residents who perceive that they stand to lose from the proposed development. On the other, councillors who want to be responsive to their electorate but never hear from the majority of it. With apologies to Matthew (15:14), planning is too often a case of the angry leading the blind. The anger is easily understood; the lack of visibility as to what the majority of a local community wants ought to be a problem easily solved.

Of course councils proactively engage communities in drawing up plans, trying to find out what they want and worry about so that new development works for everyone. The problem is they always end up asking the same residents: serial responders to local plan consultations. There are no prizes for guessing where repeat contributors stand on the notion of new development in their local area. Meanwhile the working-age population are too busy to force themselves into the conversation, and it’s left to the hardiest council officials and most courageous councillors to ignore the mailbag and try to meet our chronic need for new housing.

But understanding very local opinion is a problem we solved in political campaigning some time ago: declining response rates for face-to-face and telephone polling has made interviewing representative samples of a local population prohibitively expensive, and with campaign spending caps political parties wanted a new way. Techniques such as MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) modelling allow large-scale national surveys to be translated into estimates of opinion at ward level, and lower. At Stack, we’ve accurately predicted election outcomes in multiple countries, and companies such as YouGov also have an excellent track record of accuracy using the technique. We use it to predict with confidence how people in a local area will vote, why not how they will respond to new development?

“Planning is too often a case of the angry leading the blind”

Our analysis of England’s Output Areas (the very smallest unit of geography the ONS publishes census data at, containing on average just 300 people) gives us a detailed understanding of how support for development varies, and what explains it. Population density is a strong predictor: London is significantly more supportive of new development than relatively sparsely-populated Essex, as our tongue-in-cheek “league table” shows. But house prices are the strongest individual predictor when taken in isolation: areas with higher average house prices are less likely to be supportive of new development. Of course, the real world cannot be boiled down into isolated co-efficients: there are parts of Southwark (in London, the second-most-supportive local authority in England) that are less supportive of new development than parts of Uttlesford (in Essex, the least supportive local authority overall).

Analysis also reveals less obvious drivers: there is a strong relationship - especially in rural areas - between the density of holiday homes and support for new development, explaining Cornwall’s higher position in the league table than its other characteristics as a county might suggest.

Beyond these headline characteristics, the plot further thickens. Not all developments are created equal: even in the most apparently anti-development areas, people are more supportive of building private family housing than blocks of flats, for example. Public opinion is not monolithic, and it is not static.

For property developers or planners working with those parts of the population who are on the face of it hostile to development, there are a sizeable number who can be persuaded to support development if the case is properly made: supporting their grandchildren on to the housing ladder, for example, and addressing their concerns about the impact on local public services.

“Public opinion is not monolithic, and it is not static”

There are myriad problems facing planners, not all of them to do with local democracy and a lack of information about representative local opinion. Underfunding and policy volatility are two large contributors to the slowdown in housebuilding and new development, and of course the wider economic picture has played a part. But with housing availability reaching crisis point, and the Net Zero transition requiring a major national programme of building new energy infrastructure, the last thing we need is the capture of the process by vocal minorities who usually do not speak for the majority of people in a local community.