North East Lincolnshire's verdict on the Customs House came down to two votes out of sixteen cast, with No edging it 9-7. That is a margin, not a mandate — the kind of result that would flip with a single changed mind, and a reminder that even a live planning dispute over a landmark local building drew a strictly local, strictly modest crowd.
The demographic data here is too sparse to say much: one registered voter, in the 25-34 bracket, male, voted No, and that is the extent of what can be read into age or gender. Anything beyond that would be guesswork dressed up as insight, so the honest conclusion is that this was a decision made almost entirely by unprofiled residents voting as themselves, not as a bloc.
What the result does capture is the familiar tension in seaside-town regeneration votes: a derelict Grade II-listed building, scaled back from nine flats to seven after Environment Agency flood warnings, pitting the appeal of bringing empty heritage stock back into use against wariness about density, flood risk or the loss of another building to residential conversion rather than public use. That the vote split almost evenly suggests no consensus formed around either the heritage-rescue case or the flood-risk caution.
With turnout this light, the council gets a steer rather than a verdict — Grimsby's Customs House remains, for now, as contested on the platform as it is on the planning register.
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