New polling: How to beat new infrastructure's local support challenges and build advocacy
Chris Loy
Every major infrastructure development - whether it be railways, electricity pylons, housing, or renewables - faces local opposition and impact concerns.
It's easy to write these off as simple NIMBY-ism, but the reality is much more complex.
We conducted national polling recently to look into how voters assess the impacts, benefits, and trade-offs around infrastructure in their local area - and most poignantly, who they trust and listen to.
What we found:
- An overwhelming majority of people (69%) believe their community would benefit from new infrastructure. In the devolved nations these numbers are even higher (Northern Ireland 86%, Scotland 72%, Wales 72%), and they are reasonably consistent across all demographics and voting intentions (including the Greens, 77% of 2024 voters).
- Despite the Government's "remove red tape" positioning, more people (39%) think planning rules are about right compared to those who think they are too strict (28%)
- Most are finding out about projects from their local community members and channels. Neighbours/friends/family (31%), local council (30%), local news (27%), and local Facebook groups (26%) are the most common sources.
- Voters think private infrastructure developers end up costing the public more in the long-run. 61% strongly agree/agree on this point vs just 9% who disagree.
Key takeaways for those building new infrastructure:
- The right message carriers are even more crucial at a local level. There's a disconnect between how infrastructure promoters want to communicate benefits on a project, the story that has to be told at a national level for political support, and how they're actually being received on the ground. Voters are highly sceptical of the benefits, concerned about the impacts, and are more often than not led by local information sources such as word of mouth, Facebook and local council updates.
- There is a disconnect between planning consultation processes and how local communities think decisions should be made. We've seen this play out across a number of projects where communities want to feel that they have a voice in deciding what gets built in their area, where in the reality is much of the planning processes focus more on the how, when and mitigation. This in turn involves two major factors: 1) enabling and eliciting proper public conversation about the availability, suitability, and selection of sites for infrastructure (e.g. if there's no other choice/location that works, why is that) and 2) that building in real local engagement and advocacy workstreams is crucial to any infrastructure plan.
Want to find out more? This is just a snippet of the polling we'll be discussing at our upcoming joint event with NationBuilder which you can register interest for here: Register for Solving infrastructure hurdles & building advocacy
Other polling results we'll be discussing at the event include:
- What are the impacts local communities are most concerned about
- What infrastructure types do they want to see most; and,
- What are the benefits that they want to see from local infrastructure.