We recently came across a fascinating article from the BBC: local voting figures shed new light on EU referendum. In this news piece, using local Brexit voting information and the most recent Government Census data, trends such as a link between voting inclination and education level, were explored.
Data obtained was at an electoral ward level (an electoral ward is similar in principle to a voting constituency in that they define an area to be used for voting, but wards and constituencies define slightly different areas).
Using our life event home mover data, we undertook some analysis of our own to understand any common trends by matching the voting information obtained by the BBC to our home mover database.
Firstly, we looked at current house prices (so 8 months post Brexit) for the electoral ward areas. In each of the following graphs, each node represents an electoral ward, with the average number of votes for the UK to remain in the EU charted on the left axis.
We can see a clear trend between house prices and voting inclination; electoral wards where a 'remain' vote in the EU referendum was the winning vote are typically scored in an area of the UK with higher average house prices, and vice versa.
Secondly, we looked at New Instructions* in these same electroral wards in the 3 months after** the Brexit vote:
*New Instuctions here are ‘per household’ to allow us to directly compare electoral wards of different size
**All new instructions throughout the 3 month period following Brexit (23rd June - 23rd August)
A common label applied to ‘Leavers’ was that they were opposed to gentrification and globalisation, and felt even more marginalised by the high levels of immigration in their traditional, settled communities. This group are often characterised by a low inclination to move away from their community, and therefore a low turnover of properties in these areas is to be expected. Indeed, this is reflected by a moderate trend between those wards voting Leave and those with a low rate of New Instructions.
Lastly, we looked at price changes* in these same electoral wards, again in the 3 months after the Brexit vote:
*Price changes are per household, per electoral ward
Here we see another moderate trend between voting inclination and number of price changes; typically with the 'remain' electoral wards having, on average, a higher number of price changes. One possibility is that this is linked to the high churn rate of 'remain' voters, inferred above, rather than voting motivation itself.
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