Spoilt ballots, best and worst turnout – this year’s Sheffield City Council local elections in numbers

The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has produced more than half a dozen articles about what happened at the count and what the new makeup of the city council will mean for Sheffield for the foreseeable future.

However, there are some numbers we need to talk about.

At the count last Friday (May 3), it was announced that the total turnout was 31.87 per cent – later, on SheffNews (the council’s news website) it was reported that the overall local election turnout was 32.7 per cent.

Last year, the overall local election turnout was 31.81 per cent.

So, all in all, there was a slight increase in turnout.

The five wards with the highest turnout were:

Ecclesall (52.83 per cent)

Crookes and Crosspool (50.95 per cent)

Fulwood (46.05 per cent)

Dore and Totley (44.03 per cent)

Nether Edge and Sharrow (42.86 per cent)

It is notable that the turnout was much higher in the more affluent parts of Sheffield and in wards in the Sheffield Hallam constituency where Labour and the Liberal Democrats will fight for a marginal seat at the next general election.

The five wards with the lowest turnout were:

Southey (19.72 per cent)

City (20.78 per cent)

Shiregreen and Brightside (20.86 per cent)

Firth Park (21.18 per cent)

Manor Castle (22.01 per cent)

In Southey, long-time councillor Tony Damms – who left the Labour Party and joined the Sheffield Community Councillors Group – was unseated by the Labour candidate.

It seems that the trend is no different in Sheffield compared with the national average: people in more deprived areas are less likely to vote and have their say on what happens in their neighbourhoods. This is a trend found through analysis by Locality, a membership group for community organisations in England.

Southey – for example – is a highly deprived ward with 31 per cent of its people not having any qualifications (compared with the national average of 18 per cent).

Also, according to the council’s ward profile, in Southey, more than every one in four children (27 per cent) aged 0-19 are in relative low-income families.

The average in England is 20 per cent.

Based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), the vast majority of people in Southey live in the most deprived neighbourhoods of the country.

The same can be said about Firth Park.

Firth Park elected two councillors – following Abtisam Mohamed’s resignation to be the Labour candidate at the next election in Sheffield Central – but the turnout was still low.

Of the 22,000+ people analysed in Firth Park, almost 20,000 live in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods (the top 10 per cent or the bottom 10 per cent, it depends on how we look at the chart) in England.

Despite City ward not being highlighted as a particularly deprived area in the city council’s report, the turnout was still the second lowest of the 28 wards in Sheffield.

Spoilt ballots

While we don’t know just yet how many people were turned away from the polling stations due to not having a photo ID with them, we have the total number of spoilt (or rejected) ballots in each ward.

Most wards had between 20 and 40 rejected ballots, the two wards that differed the most from this were Nether Edge and Sharrow with 66, and Woodhouse with 12.

Birley had 14 and City 16, putting them among the wards with the lowest number of spoilt ballots.

In the 28 wards, the total number of rejected ballots was 932.