We have seen in the past two years the divisive nature of close votes, and a 52/48 could create an incredibly divisive culture within the established community of an estate. This would be further compounded if not everyone voted.
Do Estate Regeneration ballots work?
14 Feb 18
At the beginning of February the Mayor of London and Jeremy Corbyn launched the Mayor’s new guidance on Estate Regenerations. The key announcement was that the Mayor will not fund any project that does not have a ballot with residents.
But this raises some difficult questions, primarily, has the Mayor fully considered the challenges posed by ballots?
I should start by saying that the direct democracy a ballot can offer should be seen as a positive, empowering tool for residents. It would also allow a truly meaningful argument that any regeneration proposals are the correct decision for the local community.
However, ensuring that residents have all of the information presented to them clearly in an unbiased manor is a major challenge. Depending on who the author is, the same information could be seen as positively or negatively presented. There is also the question of how much information needs to be put into the ballot? For someone to make an informed decision do they need to be able to comment on the indicative plans for a development that can be up to 10 years from completion? Or is it enough to set out the principles? Do other, perhaps unrelated, estate regenerations need to be used as case studies? You can see the difficulties.
Alongside the problems of what information and how it is presented, there is also the challenge of third-party campaigns. Inevitably, there will be for and against groups for any estate regeneration, and if one group spreads mis-information does this then impact on the validity of the result? Not an easy to problem to police, other than categorically setting out the facts first. Facts, we’ve already seen are tricky to present in themselves.
Beyond the practicalities of ensuring a valid ballot, what happens in the case of a close vote?
We have seen in the past two years the divisive nature of close votes, and a 52/48 could create an incredibly divisive culture within the established community of an estate. This would be further compounded if not everyone voted.
Ultimately, estate regeneration ballots are difficult to carry out. If the Mayor wants them to be successful then stringent guidelines on how they should be carried out need to be produced.