Local Residents: No-Deal Brexit Bad For Bath

30 August 2019

Of the top five issues raised by constituents with Wera’s office, Brexit is at the top of the list. A poll by 38 Degrees provides insights into residents’ concerns about the impact of a No-Deal Brexit.

A large proportion of people in Bath think a No-Deal Brexit will be bad for people like them, and their region, according to polling* conducted by ComRes for the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees.

Medicine supplies and the cost of living are two of the main concerns people in Bath have about the impact of a no-deal Brexit.

The polling took a sample of 5,400 people and regressed the data to attain more accurate constituency-level results. It suggests that:

• 53% of people in Bath agreed with the statement “Britain leaving the European Union on a 'no deal' basis after the October 31st deadline will be bad for people like me”. Only 19% disagreed.
• Nationally the proportion of all people who agreed is 42%. Only 25% disagreed.
• 70% of people in Bath think that the cost of daily essentials will likely go up in a no-deal Brexit. Only 17% think the cost of essentials will go down.
• 58% of people in Bath think that a no-deal Brexit will “lead to problems for the UK securing medicines from EU countries.” Only 16% disagree.

*How the polling was done

Taking a large national sample, ComRes used a statistical technique called "logistic regression" to discover the average influence of these characteristics on each surveyed question. Key variables include gender, age, geographical area, past voting at the EU referendum in 2016 and past voting at the 2017 general election.

These regression values are then applied to each local authority ward in the country, where we know from census data and previous election results how many people there are with each characteristic. This gives a total estimate of the number of people in each ward who support each party. We can add this up over the wards in the constituency to get the estimates at the seat level.