The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
Posts: 36,694
Member is Online
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Post by The Bishop on Jan 29, 2021 13:04:15 GMT
One thing I am convinced of - local authorities (and other elected bodies, come to that) should always have an odd number of members.
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Post by timrollpickering on Jan 29, 2021 13:29:11 GMT
A lot of local authorities have a very odd number of members.
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Post by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ on Jan 29, 2021 15:18:58 GMT
I'd like to see the Local Government Commission legally obliged to set the number of councillors as not substantially more or less than the cube root of the electorate, with a strong operational direction that they should use the cube root unless there's a good argument to flex the numbers slightly.
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European Lefty
Labour
Can be bribed with salted liquorice
Posts: 5,621
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Post by European Lefty on Jan 29, 2021 15:20:22 GMT
I'd like to see the Local Government Commission legally obliged to set the number of councillors as not substantially more or less than the cube root of the electorate, with a strong operational direction that they should use the cube root unless there's a good argument to flex the numbers slightly. Why the cube root particularly?
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Post by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ on Jan 29, 2021 15:27:35 GMT
I'd like to see the Local Government Commission legally obliged to set the number of councillors as not substantially more or less than the cube root of the electorate, with a strong operational direction that they should use the cube root unless there's a good argument to flex the numbers slightly. Why the cube root particularly? It's the theoretical optimum size of a representative body.
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Post by andrewteale on Jan 30, 2021 10:25:37 GMT
Royal Assent has been given to the Scottish General Election (Coronavirus) Act 2021 (asp 5), an Act of the Scottish Parliament to provide for measures relating to protection against coronavirus to apply to the ordinary general election for membership of the Scottish Parliament due to be held on 6 May 2021. The Act comes into force today. The main immediate change (section 3) is that the postal vote application deadline for the 2021 Scottish Parliament election is brought forward to 21 working days before polling (rather than 11 as at present). The Scottish Ministers have the power to extend this deadline by order and are required to report relevant statistics to the Scottish Parliament as soon as practicable after 7 April 2021 (section 4). The other immediate change is that the current Scottish Parliament will be dissolved on the day before polling (section 6). The Scottish Ministers have powers to specify by order that the poll will take place entirely by post (section 5), to extend polling for up to eight days after 6 May 2021 (section 8), and to make ancillary provision relevant to anything in the Act (section 14). The Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament has an emergency power to postpone polling day by up to six months (section 11), which may only be exercised if the Scottish Parliament cannot safely meet to pass a Bill to that effect.
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Post by edgbaston on Jan 31, 2021 21:59:01 GMT
One thing I am convinced of - local authorities (and other elected bodies, come to that) should always have an odd number of members. Though if you have a none voting presiding member it may be preferable to have an even number? Weren’t some town halls ruled with the mayor’s casting vote for years, I vaguely remember reading that on this forum before.
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Post by londonseal80 on Feb 1, 2021 7:09:21 GMT
"The Local Government Boundary Commission has decided that the number of councillors in Fylde should be 37. This is a change from the current council which has 51. " That is some reduction! The review of the number of councillors by the LGBCE seems to be entirely arbitrary. There don’t seem to be any criteria, nor can any logic be discerned in the decisions. The request of the council seems to weigh heavily, and this is unpredictable too - some Conservative councils want to cut the number of councillors (presumably to try and squeeze out those pesky independents), but others don’t. And then having gone through a time-consuming and tedious process of more often than not confirming the existing size, they then produce proposals with a different number of councillors, thus throwing off everyone who submitted proposals based on the number announced by the LGBCE. Can anyone discern any logic in these decisions as to the number of councillors? Its all nonsense how the council sizes are done, how can for example Richmond have 54 and yet Bexley which is a far bigger borough have 45. Should be done per quota of per size of electorate. That would make electoral equality for councillors across the board.
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Post by John Chanin on Feb 1, 2021 8:52:52 GMT
The review of the number of councillors by the LGBCE seems to be entirely arbitrary. There don’t seem to be any criteria, nor can any logic be discerned in the decisions. The request of the council seems to weigh heavily, and this is unpredictable too - some Conservative councils want to cut the number of councillors (presumably to try and squeeze out those pesky independents), but others don’t. And then having gone through a time-consuming and tedious process of more often than not confirming the existing size, they then produce proposals with a different number of councillors, thus throwing off everyone who submitted proposals based on the number announced by the LGBCE. Can anyone discern any logic in these decisions as to the number of councillors? Its all nonsense how the council sizes are done, how can for example Richmond have 54 and yet Bexley which is a far bigger borough have 45. Should be done per quota of per size of electorate. That would make electoral equality for councillors across the board. There was in the past a rough guideline of 2500 electors per councillor, at least for first tier authorities. But second tier district councils usually had a lower quota, and large councils a higher one because otherwise they would become ridiculously unwieldy. There’s no reason why the LBGCE couldn’t develop formal guidelines, deviation from which would need to be justified. The increasing number of electors per councillor as council size rises could be codified as suggested by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ as the cube root, but I’m not endorsing this particular formula since I haven’t worked out the practical implications. But something of this sort would seem desirable.
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J.G.Harston
Lib Dem
Leave-voting Brexit-supporting Liberal Democrat
Posts: 13,680
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Post by J.G.Harston on Feb 1, 2021 9:35:03 GMT
The review of the number of councillors by the LGBCE seems to be entirely arbitrary. There don’t seem to be any criteria, nor can any logic be discerned in the decisions. The request of the council seems to weigh heavily, and this is unpredictable too - some Conservative councils want to cut the number of councillors (presumably to try and squeeze out those pesky independents), but others don’t. And then having gone through a time-consuming and tedious process of more often than not confirming the existing size, they then produce proposals with a different number of councillors, thus throwing off everyone who submitted proposals based on the number announced by the LGBCE. Can anyone discern any logic in these decisions as to the number of councillors? Its all nonsense how the council sizes are done, how can for example Richmond have 54 and yet Bexley which is a far bigger borough have 45. Should be done per quota of per size of electorate. That would make electoral equality for councillors across the board. The problem with electoral equality across the board is that different councils are different sizes. You'd either have Barnsley with 12 councillors based on Birmingham's quota, or Birmingham with 250 councillors based on Barnsley's quota.
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Khunanup
Lib Dem
Portsmouth Liberal Democrats
Posts: 11,545
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Post by Khunanup on Feb 1, 2021 9:38:33 GMT
Its all nonsense how the council sizes are done, how can for example Richmond have 54 and yet Bexley which is a far bigger borough have 45. Should be done per quota of per size of electorate. That would make electoral equality for councillors across the board. There was in the past a rough guideline of 2500 electors per councillor, at least for first tier authorities. But second tier district councils usually had a lower quota, and large councils a higher one because otherwise they would become ridiculously unwieldy. There’s no reason why the LBGCE couldn’t develop formal guidelines, deviation from which would need to be justified. The increasing number of electors per councillor as council size rises could be codified as suggested by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ as the cube root, but I’m not endorsing this particular formula since I haven’t worked out the practical implications. But something of this sort would seem desirable. When they put in place the urban unitaries in the '90s the LGBCE seemingly had a formula of about 3,300 electors per councillor across the board. That was never extended to any other single tier councils though so you continue with large disparities, not least with identical unitaries like Newcastle (which just so happens to be a legacy Met council) having a massive 78 councillors when somewhere like Southampton has a population only a sixth smaller but having a council with 30 less seats and Liverpool has a population 2/3rds bigger again than Newcastle with only 12 more councillors (and pretty much tracks with the seats per electors of the 90s urban unitaries). Where you even have these huge inconsistencies in similar areas it goes to show what arbitrary nonsense the council size consideration is.
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Post by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ on Feb 1, 2021 21:24:08 GMT
The increasing number of electors per councillor as council size rises could be codified as suggested by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ as the cube root, but I’m not endorsing this particular formula since I haven’t worked out the practical implications. But something of this sort would seem desirable. Just to give an idea of practical implications, let's pick a vaguely representative sample of districts: - Birmingham: by the cube-root rule, 91 (currently 101)
- Leeds: 84 (99)
- Sheffield: 75 (84)
- Liverpool: 70 (90)
- Lambeth: 63 (63)
- Kingston-upon-Hull: 57 (57)
- Stockton-on-Tees: 52 (56)
- Somerset West and Taunton: 49 (59)
- Norwich: 47 (39)
- Welwyn-Hatfield: 44 (48)
- Carlisle: 44 (52)
- Watford: 42 (36)
- Redditch: 40 (29)
- Craven: 36 (30)
- Rutland: 31 (27)
- Orkney Islands: 26 (21)
- Isles of Scilly: 12 (16)
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Post by islington on Feb 1, 2021 22:07:44 GMT
And a House of Commons of about 360.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2021 22:37:26 GMT
And a House of Commons of about 360. 47,558,398 / 360 seats is an electorate of 132,106, which I might try to play with on PlanBuilder.
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Feb 2, 2021 11:55:54 GMT
I don't see any practical reason to prefer the cube root (AIUI, the argument is that most legislatures worldwide approximate to it, but I'm not aware of any evidence showing those which are closer to it perform better) but I do think a standard formula ought to be used. You could take into account something like the following list of factors: - Size of electorate
- Whether the constituency is predominantly rural or predominantly urban
- Whether it's a district, county or unitary
- Number of places on statutory committees
- Numbers of places on other committees or on outside bodies
- Probably a hard max/min on council sizes
- Very definitely NOT whether a council has leader-and-cabinet or a committee system, because if that's relevant then switching from one to the other ought to trigger a boundary review and it doesn't
Feed that in and get a formula suggesting that on average there should be one councillor for every X electors, then stick a confidence interval on either side and recommend whichever council size makes it easiest to avoid splitting parishes and similar. Most of that information is gathered anyway as part of the process, but if you shift the dynamic to the LGBCE deciding on a size and then asking people to argue against it, you'd have a more justifiable system.
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Post by andrewteale on Feb 2, 2021 13:32:25 GMT
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Harry Hayfield
Green
Cavalier Gentleman (as in 17th century Cavalier)
Posts: 2,812
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Post by Harry Hayfield on Feb 2, 2021 17:22:47 GMT
Should this also go into the by-elections thread, seeing as we know that Lab's candidate is the current MP for Batley and Spen and as Lab haven't lost a West Yorkshire election for years, this is a complete shoe in for her?
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Post by evergreenadam on Feb 2, 2021 17:27:13 GMT
Lambeth draft recommendations published with a new ward centred on new developments at Vauxhall.
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Post by greenchristian on Feb 2, 2021 18:55:02 GMT
Royal Assent has been given to the Scottish General Election (Coronavirus) Act 2021 (asp 5), an Act of the Scottish Parliament to provide for measures relating to protection against coronavirus to apply to the ordinary general election for membership of the Scottish Parliament due to be held on 6 May 2021. The Act comes into force today. The main immediate change (section 3) is that the postal vote application deadline for the 2021 Scottish Parliament election is brought forward to 21 working days before polling (rather than 11 as at present). The Scottish Ministers have the power to extend this deadline by order and are required to report relevant statistics to the Scottish Parliament as soon as practicable after 7 April 2021 (section 4). So the legislation to protect against coronavirus means you have to apply for a postal vote earlier than you did before? I'm not sure I understand the logic involved.
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Post by andrewteale on Feb 2, 2021 19:08:50 GMT
Royal Assent has been given to the Scottish General Election (Coronavirus) Act 2021 (asp 5), an Act of the Scottish Parliament to provide for measures relating to protection against coronavirus to apply to the ordinary general election for membership of the Scottish Parliament due to be held on 6 May 2021. The Act comes into force today. The main immediate change (section 3) is that the postal vote application deadline for the 2021 Scottish Parliament election is brought forward to 21 working days before polling (rather than 11 as at present). The Scottish Ministers have the power to extend this deadline by order and are required to report relevant statistics to the Scottish Parliament as soon as practicable after 7 April 2021 (section 4). So the legislation to protect against coronavirus means you have to apply for a postal vote earlier than you did before? I'm not sure I understand the logic involved. The expectation is that there will be a high demand for postal votes this year. Presumably there were concerns over getting them all processed in time.
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