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Post by No Offence Alan on Mar 24, 2020 18:23:55 GMT
No. Far better to be on a different interval and a longer one. The issue is that if we have five year Parliaments and eight year reviews, we'll inevitably have years where there's less than a year between a set of new boundaries and the election on those boundaries. Which will cause all sorts of issues for party organisations in terms of selection of candidates, selection of target seats, and the like. It would be far better for everyone if the number of years between reviews were an integer multiple of the expected gap between Westminster elections, ensuring that (unpredictable snap elections aside) reviews complete somewhere in the middle of a Parliament, rather than just before the end of one. 8 years is an integer multiple of 2 years, the gaps between our last 3 elections. |
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Post by greenchristian on Mar 24, 2020 18:55:32 GMT
It's a bit swings-and-roundabouts. No matter how many constituencies you set a review at, there will be areas where it's difficult to draw sensible boundaries. With the electorate figures as they are on boundary assistant, 650 seats means Solihull borough won't fit into two constituencies. Which caused me all sorts of problems when I was playing around with that area after the site relaunch a month or two back (I suspect solving the problem would be easier once the Birmingham figures are updated for the new wards, though). But Sheffield has a total number of wards which is (near enough) a multiple of 5.5, so it makes it a lot easier to juggle them together into larger units. 600 seats left us trying to fit 28 wards into five seats.
Anyway! Time to dig out the electorate maps again! 
Fair enough. My point was that there is always going to be somewhere which is difficult. Picking a number which makes it easier for your area inevitably makes it more difficult in some other area, so we really shouldn't be deciding the number of constituencies based on whether it's convenient for one particular area of the country. |
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Post by kevinlarkin on Mar 24, 2020 19:31:10 GMT
Peter Bone's bill, which he withdrew today, proposed a tolerance of 7.5% with separate quotas for Northern Ireland (fixed at 18 seats) and Great Britain (632). Hopefully an amendment to the government bill for a tolerance above 5% will find cross-party support.
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Post by islington on Mar 24, 2020 19:43:19 GMT
Very interesting. It’s heartening to see that ministers aren’t allowing any small passing current concerns to deflect their attention from what really matters.
It’s important that the Order in Council should take effect without a confirmatory vote in Parliament. I hope they stick to their guns on this; drawing fair boundaries is too important to become a political football. If Parliament is desperate enough to want to block the changes it will have to legislate.
I’d prefer to see ten years between reviews; it somehow seems a more natural interval. It would normally mean two or three GEs on each set of boundaries.
It’s ambitious to stick to the 5% tolerance when the seats are going to be smaller. I support a tight tolerance and 5% should work well enough where wards are small but I’d prefer a little wiggle room, perhaps to 7%, but only where the Commission can’t find a sensible solution within the 5%.
An interesting omission from the statement concerned the reference to EU constituencies in the current rules. I presume this will be dropped now we’ve left the EU, but will there be any kind of regional factor at all?
Finally (for now), this legislation will have to be brought forward pretty smartly if the review is to start next year.
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Post by islington on Mar 24, 2020 20:00:39 GMT
No. Far better to be on a different interval and a longer one. The issue is that if we have five year Parliaments and eight year reviews, we'll inevitably have years where there's less than a year between a set of new boundaries and the election on those boundaries. Which will cause all sorts of issues for party organisations in terms of selection of candidates, selection of target seats, and the like. It would be far better for everyone if the number of years between reviews were an integer multiple of the expected gap between Westminster elections, ensuring that (unpredictable snap elections aside) reviews complete somewhere in the middle of a Parliament, rather than just before the end of one. Well, yes, but this is always going to be an issue if the duration of Parliaments isn’t fixed: quite apart from routine dissolutions in the last year of a Parliament, there’s always the possibility that some political crisis could precipitate a sudden GE at any time. I can understand why political parties are apprehensive about fighting an election only a short time after a new set of boundaries has been decided. But history suggests they can cope with it. Successive waves of Parliamentary reform resulted in the creation of new boundaries in 1832, 1868, 1885 and 1918, each of which was followed by a GE after a matter of months; and political parties coped. The more limited changes of 1945 were also passed only a short time before that year's GE. I’m not sure exactly how much notice political parties had of the new boundaries that took effect at the 1950 and 1955 GEs, but I don’t think it was very long. I’ve just checked 1885, because this was the most revolutionary set of boundary changes ever introduced (even more far-reaching than 1832). The Redistribution Act got Royal Assent on 25 June; it was followed by a GE with polling between 24 Nov and 18 Dec. So political parties had just under five months before the first constituencies voted (and they had a huge extension of the franchise to contend with as well). |
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Harry Hayfield
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Post by Harry Hayfield on Mar 24, 2020 20:26:30 GMT
Using the data from the general election, it looks as if Wales gains from this as the estimated number of constituencies increases from the original suggestion of 29 up to a potential 32 (which is down eight on where we are at the moment, but is comparable to Wales in 1885 (34 seats)
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Post by 🏴☠️ Neath West 🏴☠️ on Mar 24, 2020 21:11:56 GMT
An interesting omission from the statement concerned the reference to EU constituencies in the current rules. I presume this will be dropped now we’ve left the EU, but will there be any kind of regional factor at all? I hope it's replaced by ceremonial counties, paired if necessary. |
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Post by greenhert on Mar 24, 2020 21:15:20 GMT
They should increase the tolerance limit from 5% to 10%, really, especially given that it will make many metropolitan constituencies messy to say the least.
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Post by greenchristian on Mar 24, 2020 22:01:15 GMT
The issue is that if we have five year Parliaments and eight year reviews, we'll inevitably have years where there's less than a year between a set of new boundaries and the election on those boundaries. Which will cause all sorts of issues for party organisations in terms of selection of candidates, selection of target seats, and the like. It would be far better for everyone if the number of years between reviews were an integer multiple of the expected gap between Westminster elections, ensuring that (unpredictable snap elections aside) reviews complete somewhere in the middle of a Parliament, rather than just before the end of one. Well, yes, but this is always going to be an issue if the duration of Parliaments isn’t fixed: quite apart from routine dissolutions in the last year of a Parliament, there’s always the possibility that some political crisis could precipitate a sudden GE at any time. I can understand why political parties are apprehensive about fighting an election only a short time after a new set of boundaries has been decided. But history suggests they can cope with it. Successive waves of Parliamentary reform resulted in the creation of new boundaries in 1832, 1868, 1885 and 1918, each of which was followed by a GE after a matter of months; and political parties coped. The more limited changes of 1945 were also passed only a short time before that year's GE. I’m not sure exactly how much notice political parties had of the new boundaries that took effect at the 1950 and 1955 GEs, but I don’t think it was very long. I’ve just checked 1885, because this was the most revolutionary set of boundary changes ever introduced (even more far-reaching than 1832). The Redistribution Act got Royal Assent on 25 June; it was followed by a GE with polling between 24 Nov and 18 Dec. So political parties had just under five months before the first constituencies voted (and they had a huge extension of the franchise to contend with as well). I think my biggest concern really is that an election very shortly after significant boundary changes can significantly increase the unfair advantage that FPTP gives to the biggest parties, since it limits the opportunities to do the kind of longer-term targetting that the Liberals/Lib Dems in particular have used to overcome the problems that a smaller party has in turning their voteshare into seats.It's less of a problem for the biggest two parties, since they don't need their vote to be anywhere near as concentrated in order to win seats. |
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Crimson King
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Post by Crimson King on Mar 24, 2020 23:14:35 GMT
They should increase the tolerance limit from 5% to 10%, really, especially given that it will make many metropolitan constituencies messy to say the least. iirc someone did some modelling last but one time and demonstrated that increasing the tolerance to 7.5 made a big difference, a further increase to 10 was of little additional benefit. I think the link was provided by Davıd Boothroyd but I may be wrong |
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Post by John Chanin on Mar 25, 2020 7:21:33 GMT
They should increase the tolerance limit from 5% to 10%, really, especially given that it will make many metropolitan constituencies messy to say the least. iirc someone did some modelling last but one time and demonstrated that increasing the tolerance to 7.5 made a big difference, a further increase to 10 was of little additional benefit. I think the link was provided by Davıd Boothroyd but I may be wrong My fiddling round with the data last time showed that 7.5% would be enough to avoid most problems. The Parliamentary Committee which looked at this went for 7.5%. Even islington , who is the most fundamentalist, is accepting that there are circumstances in which it is reasonable to exceed 5%. We shall see. There will certainly be an amendment put down to this effect. I can’t believe the government will want to go to the stake defending 5%. On the other hand many MPs are innumerate. Note that I believe in principle that seats should be as equal as possible. This is simply a practical matter in the context of how our system works. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Mar 25, 2020 9:24:32 GMT
They should increase the tolerance limit from 5% to 10%, really, especially given that it will make many metropolitan constituencies messy to say the least. iirc someone did some modelling last but one time and demonstrated that increasing the tolerance to 7.5 made a big difference, a further increase to 10 was of little additional benefit. I think the link was provided by Davıd Boothroyd but I may be wrong This was in the McDougall Trust report: www.mcdougall.org.uk/uploads/PDFs/Equality-Community-and-ContinuityFJUne25.pdfPages 15-19. |
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Post by Crimson King on Mar 25, 2020 11:01:52 GMT
Diolch yn fawr
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Post by The Bishop on Mar 25, 2020 12:43:20 GMT
I thought they might be more friendly to making Ynys Mon a "preserved" seat given its change of allegiance a few months ago.
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Post by gwynthegriff on Mar 25, 2020 12:58:37 GMT
I thought they might be more friendly to making Ynys Mon a "preserved" seat given its change of allegiance a few months ago. The "preserved" status of Ynys Mon is a nonsense. |
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Post by Adrian on Mar 25, 2020 13:30:24 GMT
An interesting omission from the statement concerned the reference to EU constituencies in the current rules. I presume this will be dropped now we’ve left the EU, but will there be any kind of regional factor at all? I hope it's replaced by ceremonial counties, paired if necessary. The problem with pairing counties is that they may need to be unpaired 8 years later, and new pairs found, which is unnecessarily disruptive. It's better to have a tolerance that allows counties to be kept whole, as it were, except for a few small counties which are statutorily paired, eg. Rutland with Leicestershire, Herefordshire with Worcestershire. |
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Post by pl on Mar 25, 2020 13:34:43 GMT
An interesting omission from the statement concerned the reference to EU constituencies in the current rules. I presume this will be dropped now we’ve left the EU, but will there be any kind of regional factor at all? Doesn't have to be dropped. The Euro-constituencies are still the basis for English regional economic statistics, so still have some uses. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Mar 25, 2020 14:11:25 GMT
They are not European Parliament constituencies, they are the standard regions of England.
There haven't been any European Parliament constituencies since 1999, although they do indeed live on in ghostly form as the regional top-up areas for the Scottish Parliament and Senedd.
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Post by islington on Mar 25, 2020 14:22:41 GMT
An interesting omission from the statement concerned the reference to EU constituencies in the current rules. I presume this will be dropped now we’ve left the EU, but will there be any kind of regional factor at all? Doesn't have to be dropped. The Euro-constituencies are still the basis for English regional economic statistics, so still have some uses. I'm in two minds about it. On the one hand, the EU electoral regions allowed definite allotments of whole numbers of seats to the various parts of England, and this simplified and clarified the process (and I suspect also made Mr Larkin's life easier). On the other hand, regional boundaries that are in practice uncrossable create some rigidities. The obligation to treat N Lincs and NE Lincs UAs separately from Lincs is one example. Another is Milton Keynes UA: obviously we haven't got the numbers yet but we can pretty sure it will be too big for two seats and too small for three, so it will have to be paired. If you use the existing regions, or ceremonial counties, that pairing can only be with Bucks. It so happened that under the 2018 review (or 'Zombie II' as we should perhaps start to call it) a pairing with Bucks worked out reasonably well; but what if, when we see the numbers for the new review, it is obvious that a pairing with Nhants or Beds would work far better? It's a finely balanced argument. I think on the whole I prefer retaining the regions, but I can see a strong case either way. If the regions are dropped, I think there should remain a rule that no constituency should cross the boundary of Greater London. Finally on the tolerance: I've said this before (so feel free to stop reading at this point) but I strongly disagree with greenrobinhood's suggestion of 10%. It would mean that, if we assume for the purposes of illustration an electoral quota of 72500, you could have adjoining seats with electorates of 65251 and 79749 and you be obliged to regard this situation as perfectly regular and satisfactory. Even if there were a ward or two on the boundary ripe for shifting, you would not be able to make the change (absent some other factor such as better community ties with the smaller seat) because the obligation is only to get seats within the range, not to aim for the middle of the range. I do agree that the slightly smaller seats under the new review will make 5% very challenging to achieve, so I suppose I could live with 7% or 7.5%, but 10% is far too much. |
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Post by jamie on Mar 25, 2020 14:41:28 GMT
I’d pretty much stick with the European Parliament constituencies (or whatever were calling them). We need some way of breaking the review into reasonably manageable chunks and I’m not convinced by county allocation (inequality and just don’t think they’re as sacred as some others).
On another note, I’d rather the commission abandon their rigidity with regards to the use of wards as building blocks. Ward boundaries are perfectly reasonable as a piece of criteria, but they have taken too much precedence over the other criteria. We should allow the splitting of wards when needed to preserve communities of interest eg; for large wards in places like Sheffield, or when current ward boundaries themselves are illogical such as including geographically detached parts. You could still have the vast majority of constituencies made up of whole wards, but allow a small minority to use polling districts in order to prevent the messes that the commission has proposed these last 2 reviews.
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