When the question is the decision: what an empty building taught me about community empowerment -Emma Payne
The consultation came back split down the middle. Just over 250 residents had told us what should happen to a much-loved local building, and the headline wrote itself: the community was divided, fifty-fifty, no clear steer. So, the council decided the building would go up for sale.
Except it wasn’t fifty-fifty. Keeping the building for community use was the single most popular choice picked by almost half of everyone who responded. The “tie” only appeared because we had taken three different “sell it” options and added them together against the one “keep it” option. Bundle the alternatives and almost anything can be made to look like a dead heat. The split wasn’t in the community. It was in the question.
The building behind the numbers
This isn’t a story about a cash-strapped council quietly offloading an asset. Twenty years ago, my council bought this site, to stop the library inside it from closing. We ran it as a community building for two decades, moved the library to a better home in 2025, and were left with a vacant building and a decision about its future. The proceeds of any sale are ring-fenced for the town. The decision to sell is settled, and settled for residents, not against them. Stotfold Town Council: Simpson Centre
Consultation - The Result
So why does the question still matter, if the sale is going ahead anyway? Because how you sell, and what you fund with the money, is exactly where residents’ power now sits. And that turns out to be a national argument, not a local one.
What’s it worth? Ask Sevenoaks
Right now, local government reorganisation is forcing councils everywhere to put a price on community assets. In Sevenoaks, the district council owns the Stag Theatre, which the Town Council and an army of volunteers have run for years. With the district about to be abolished, Sevenoaks wants to own the building outright before it passes to a new authority. The district has offered three options: buy the freehold for £650,000, take a 30-year peppercorn lease, or let the lease simply transfer to the new authority (Sevenoaks Town Council seeking freehold of The Stag, along with Bradbourne Lakes and The Shambles, before district councils are dissolved) Residents have asked why anyone should pay for something they already own.
This is not just about money; it is about what the law allows. The district says it cannot transfer the freehold for a nominal sum, while the Town Council, backed by King’s Counsel, says it can. Both cite the same “best consideration” duty, but interpret value differently: not only as price, but as social, cultural or economic benefit. The law allows judgement, and that judgement reveals what a community values most.
Which brings us back to the question you put in front of residents. How do you determine the value of an asset?
How a fair-looking consultation makes your mind up for you.
The problem is not intent, but design. It’s what happens, when we design a consultation without stopping to ask what the design itself is deciding. Watch out for:
Bundling. Split one popular option against three versions of its opposite, and a clear preference dissolves into a fake tie. John Gaventa’s idea of the “invited space” is useful here: when we invite people to take part, we also set the boundaries of what they can choose, and those boundaries can settle the outcome before anyone speaks.
Forced choice. Our development question was compulsory, and every option on it assumed a sale. Residents told us in the free-text boxes that it “forced the narrative.” Botes and van Rensburg called this one of the recurring “plagues” of participation, a process that manufactures a preference instead of measuring one.
Hidden costs. People were asked to choose between options without ever seeing what each would cost them on their council tax. De Vente and colleagues found, after studying dozens of participatory processes, that it is the design of a process, far more than the goodwill behind it, that decides whether engagement empowers anyone.
Arnstein, more than fifty years ago, had a blunt word for consultation that looks like participation but keeps the real decision elsewhere. She put it on a ladder, and not on a high rung.
Read past your own headline
Here’s the part we nearly missed. When we asked residents not to pick an option but to rank what mattered to them, the answer was emphatic. Community benefit from the proceeds came top. “Maximum financial return” came last, or near-last, for more than three-quarters of them.
That is residents doing something a consultation rarely lets them do: not choosing between options someone else drew up but defining the criterion itself - what “best value” should even mean. That is the real transfer of power, and it costs nothing to grant. The legal route to selling at an undervalue for community benefit isn’t a loophole to be embarrassed about; it is the community’s own answer, made lawful, sitting in your results all along - if you read past the headline you wrote yourself.
The most empowering thing we do
So, here’s my challenge to the rest of us: the clerks who design these consultations, often with no training in question design and a reorganisation looming. The lesson isn’t “stop consulting.” It’s the question that does the deciding. Before we ask people to choose, we should check whether the options are bundled, whether the choice is forced, whether the costs are visible. Be honest about what’s already settled and give away real power over what isn’t - because empowerment isn’t pretending every question is open; it’s making sure the open ones genuinely belong to the community.
A right to be consulted is worth very little if the question was rigged before anyone answered. Empowerment doesn’t begin at the consultation response. It begins earlier, in who gets to shape the question, because whoever writes the question has already made half the decision.
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