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Post by Wisconsin on Jul 27, 2020 15:27:58 GMT
The second reading is currently taking place in the Lords.
Lord Tyler’s comments at 15:59 were quite useful on key matters of ward splitting, local authority crossings and the 5% limit.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 29, 2020 8:19:15 GMT
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robert1
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Post by robert1 on Jul 29, 2020 10:52:54 GMT
Can I disagree (but not from a position of certainty) with the view that, in either Zombie Review, the BCE were trying to protect a particular seat (Coventry NE or Bury S) which happened to be within quota. It probably had more to do with their unwillingness to split wards.
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ilerda
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Post by ilerda on Jul 29, 2020 11:12:01 GMT
This is rather a quixotic venture. Not even anyone on this forum has seriously advocated for 15% tolerance as far as I'm aware.
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Jul 29, 2020 12:43:34 GMT
This is rather a quixotic venture. Not even anyone on this forum has seriously advocated for 15% tolerance as far as I'm aware. I'm not even sure what it's intended to do. It seems like it's an attempt to maintain some of the very small Welsh seats, but if you're retaining the same allocation of seats to Wales then all you're accomplishing is to create a few seats with 85,000 electors so you can have some with 60,000.
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Post by greenchristian on Jul 29, 2020 12:56:41 GMT
Can I disagree (but not from a position of certainty) with the view that, in either Zombie Review, the BCE were trying to protect a particular seat (Coventry NE or Bury S) which happened to be within quota. It probably had more to do with their unwillingness to split wards. In the case of Coventry NE, that suggests that they didn't put much effort into looking for alternative solutions which didn't split wards. The Coventry South and Kenilworth arrangement which formed the basis of all but one party submission for the area* wasn't exactly difficult to find, and Labour's proposal to combine Coventry with Bedworth didn't contain any ward splits either. Obviously we can't know for sure what they were thinking unless they make a statement about it. But the most obvious interpretation of what they did in that case (the one with which I am very familiar) is that they started by keeping Coventry NE as is, found something that worked (in the sense that everything was within quota) and didn't bother looking for a better plan.
*Conservative and Lib Dem plans for Coventry, Warwickshire, and Solihull were identical, and the Green plan differed from them by a single ward.
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carolus
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Post by carolus on Jul 29, 2020 13:23:12 GMT
This is rather a quixotic venture. Not even anyone on this forum has seriously advocated for 15% tolerance as far as I'm aware. I'm not even sure what it's intended to do. It seems like it's an attempt to maintain some of the very small Welsh seats, but if you're retaining the same allocation of seats to Wales then all you're accomplishing is to create a few seats with 85,000 electors so you can have some with 60,000. If I recall correctly from the public bill committee, there was some discussion about the fact that various valleys in the south would need to be split. I'd assume the purpose of this amendment was to "fix" that.
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Post by islington on Jul 29, 2020 13:29:22 GMT
Can I disagree (but not from a position of certainty) with the view that, in either Zombie Review, the BCE were trying to protect a particular seat (Coventry NE or Bury S) which happened to be within quota. It probably had more to do with their unwillingness to split wards. In the case of Coventry NE, that suggests that they didn't put much effort into looking for alternative solutions which didn't split wards. The Coventry South and Kenilworth arrangement which formed the basis of all but one party submission for the area* wasn't exactly difficult to find, and Labour's proposal to combine Coventry with Bedworth didn't contain any ward splits either. Obviously we can't know for sure what they were thinking unless they make a statement about it. But the most obvious interpretation of what they did in that case (the one with which I am very familiar) is that they started by keeping Coventry NE as is, found something that worked (in the sense that everything was within quota) and didn't bother looking for a better plan.
*Conservative and Lib Dem plans for Coventry, Warwickshire, and Solihull were identical, and the Green plan differed from them by a single ward.
I'd endorse robert1's doubts here (including his lack of certainty on the point).
The issue in Z18 was that Coventry as a whole was too small to retain three complete seats. One approach was certainly, as you suggest, to link much of Coventry S (which was too small) with Kenilworth, although this would have involved disrupting Coventry NE, a seat that was within range and could otherwise have been left alone. The alternative, put forward by the BCE, was to add in two wards of Solihull (Meriden and, I think, Knowle), in which case Coventry NE would be unchanged and Coventry S could be brought within range by the addition of a single ward from within the city (Whoberley). I can't speak for the BCE, but I can say that I also preferred Plan B less because of keeping Coventry NE unchanged (although that was a welcome byproduct) than because I thought it was better to supply Coventry's shortfall from elsewhere in the W Mids Met County rather than from Warwickshire.
To make out your case that the BCE allowed itself to be led astray by an excessive reverence for the sacrosanctity of Coventry NE, you need to argue not just that the Kenilworth plan was better than the Meriden alternative (for which I accept there's a perfectly reasonable case) but that it is so much better than no reasonable person could have chosen the latter option except in order to preserve Coventry NE.
This is a difficult case to make.
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Jul 29, 2020 14:40:22 GMT
Can I disagree (but not from a position of certainty) with the view that, in either Zombie Review, the BCE were trying to protect a particular seat (Coventry NE or Bury S) which happened to be within quota. It probably had more to do with their unwillingness to split wards. In the case of Coventry NE, that suggests that they didn't put much effort into looking for alternative solutions which didn't split wards. The Coventry South and Kenilworth arrangement which formed the basis of all but one party submission for the area* wasn't exactly difficult to find, and Labour's proposal to combine Coventry with Bedworth didn't contain any ward splits either. Obviously we can't know for sure what they were thinking unless they make a statement about it. But the most obvious interpretation of what they did in that case (the one with which I am very familiar) is that they started by keeping Coventry NE as is, found something that worked (in the sense that everything was within quota) and didn't bother looking for a better plan. *Conservative and Lib Dem plans for Coventry, Warwickshire, and Solihull were identical, and the Green plan differed from them by a single ward.
This also fits with how the BCE wrote their reports, where they made a deliberate point of stating very early on which seats were in quota, and where changes to them were inevitable they specifically laid out why. That naturally leads itself to a reading that they prioritised minimising changes to in-quota seats, even if that meant other seats required more extensive changes.
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Post by greenchristian on Jul 29, 2020 16:09:01 GMT
In the case of Coventry NE, that suggests that they didn't put much effort into looking for alternative solutions which didn't split wards. The Coventry South and Kenilworth arrangement which formed the basis of all but one party submission for the area* wasn't exactly difficult to find, and Labour's proposal to combine Coventry with Bedworth didn't contain any ward splits either. Obviously we can't know for sure what they were thinking unless they make a statement about it. But the most obvious interpretation of what they did in that case (the one with which I am very familiar) is that they started by keeping Coventry NE as is, found something that worked (in the sense that everything was within quota) and didn't bother looking for a better plan.
*Conservative and Lib Dem plans for Coventry, Warwickshire, and Solihull were identical, and the Green plan differed from them by a single ward.
I'd endorse robert1's doubts here (including his lack of certainty on the point).
The issue in Z18 was that Coventry as a whole was too small to retain three complete seats. One approach was certainly, as you suggest, to link much of Coventry S (which was too small) with Kenilworth, although this would have involved disrupting Coventry NE, a seat that was within range and could otherwise have been left alone. The alternative, put forward by the BCE, was to add in two wards of Solihull (Meriden and, I think, Knowle), in which case Coventry NE would be unchanged and Coventry S could be brought within range by the addition of a single ward from within the city (Whoberley). I can't speak for the BCE, but I can say that I also preferred Plan B less because of keeping Coventry NE unchanged (although that was a welcome byproduct) than because I thought it was better to supply Coventry's shortfall from elsewhere in the W Mids Met County rather than from Warwickshire.
To make out your case that the BCE allowed itself to be led astray by an excessive reverence for the sacrosanctity of Coventry NE, you need to argue not just that the Kenilworth plan was better than the Meriden alternative (for which I accept there's a perfectly reasonable case) but that it is so much better than no reasonable person could have chosen the latter option except in order to preserve Coventry NE.
This is a difficult case to make.
I didn't intend to say that there was no other possible way the BCE could have got where they did in their initial proposals merely that trying to preserve Coventry NE was the most likely reason that plan took the form it did. There's nothing in the BCEs work which suggests a preference for avoiding crossing Met county boundaries (your personal reason for preferring an alternative), and in this particular case Warwickshire had to have a cross-county seat somewhere. EAL's point (which I had forgotten about until he pointed it out) is another factor that suggests the BCE's primary motivation was keeping Coventry NE unchanged.
In terms of how much better or worse the different plans were, I think it's pretty much unarguable that the Kenilworth plan (or minor variations around that theme) was the least change option for the entire area (there was a simple ward swap between Solihull and Meriden, North Warwickshire and Nuneaton were barely changed, and the only changes in south Warwickshire were the way the remaining seats shared out the rural wards). It's rare to find an area looking as similar before and after a review where it has to lose a seat. That's the reason why the only party plan that put forward something different was Labour's (which was obviously motivated by partisan concerns).
The Meriden plan was very much a mess - it forced unnecessary radical change to Solihull borough and was a major factor in that horrible rural seat that stretched most of the way across Worcestershire and South Warwickshire. Its only "advantages" were keeping one existing seat unchanged, moving the necessary Warwickshire cross-county seat from the Coventry/Warwickshire border to the Warwickshire/Worcestershire border, and maybe the impact of having a few smaller wards paired with parts of Birmingham. It still seems to me that keeping the one seat intact was by far the most likely motivation for coming up with that plan. Even if the motivation was finding a plan for Birmingham that didn't involve ward splits the Coventry wards aren't that much smaller than the old Birmingham ones, and there is far less room for manoeuvre in Coventry when it comes to paring the city with surrounding areas.
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Post by islington on Jul 29, 2020 16:19:53 GMT
Sorry, I may have misunderstood the original point, in which case I apologize.
I thought the complaint was that Coventry NE was singled out as being in special need of preservation without change.
If the complaint was the BCE, in general, tries to maintain existing seats when it can, then I suggest that the rules, without absolutely requiring them to do so, give them a pretty strong shove in that direction. Of the five 'factors' listed in para 5(1) of Sch 2 to the 1986 Act, three relate in some way to avoiding disruption to existing seats. If that's what greenchristian meant, then I imagine that BCE would plead 'guilty as charged' but point him in the direction of the rules. After all, if an existing seat is within range and you can come up with a decent plan that preserves it, why wouldn't you go with that? (Especially if the alternative plan not only disrupts the existing seat but also requires you to cross a county boundary that doesn't need to be crossed?)
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Jul 29, 2020 16:56:59 GMT
Yes, but the problem is that the aim set out by the legislation is to avoid disruption to existing seats, not simply to those existing seats which can remain unchanged. There are a number of cases where choosing to leave one seat unchanged caused a host of much more disruptive changes to seats which might otherwise have seen quite limited changes.
In this respect, it's something of a shame that for the Zombie Reviews the BCE discontinued their prior practice of stating how many electors had been moved from one constituency to another.
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Post by greenchristian on Jul 29, 2020 16:58:25 GMT
Sorry, I may have misunderstood the original point, in which case I apologize. I thought the complaint was that Coventry NE was singled out as being in special need of preservation without change. If the complaint was the BCE, in general, tries to maintain existing seats when it can, then I suggest that the rules, without absolutely requiring them to do so, give them a pretty strong shove in that direction. Of the five 'factors' listed in para 5(1) of Sch 2 to the 1986 Act, three relate in some way to avoiding disruption to existing seats. If that's what greenchristian meant, then I imagine that BCE would plead 'guilty as charged' but point him in the direction of the rules. After all, if an existing seat is within range and you can come up with a decent plan that preserves it, why wouldn't you go with that? (Especially if the alternative plan not only disrupts the existing seat but also requires you to cross a county boundary that doesn't need to be crossed?) Yes, you did misunderstand. I was originally using it as an example of a case where wanting to preserve an existing seat as is was at least a partial cause for a large number of negative knock-on effects. I didn't intend to imply that it was singled out in any way (except, perhaps, by virtue of being the only existing seat anywhere nearby which was within quota). And in my other posts on this point I was defending my view that this was the primary motivation for the shape of the initial plan in that particular area.
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carolus
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Post by carolus on Jul 29, 2020 17:36:38 GMT
The House of Lords Committee stage for the Bill is scheduled for 8/9.
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Adrian
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Post by Adrian on Jul 29, 2020 19:58:38 GMT
Can I disagree (but not from a position of certainty) with the view that, in either Zombie Review, the BCE were trying to protect a particular seat (Coventry NE or Bury S) which happened to be within quota. It probably had more to do with their unwillingness to split wards. In the case of Coventry NE, that suggests that they didn't put much effort into looking for alternative solutions which didn't split wards. The Coventry South and Kenilworth arrangement which formed the basis of all but one party submission for the area* wasn't exactly difficult to find, and Labour's proposal to combine Coventry with Bedworth didn't contain any ward splits either. Obviously we can't know for sure what they were thinking unless they make a statement about it. But the most obvious interpretation of what they did in that case (the one with which I am very familiar) is that they started by keeping Coventry NE as is, found something that worked (in the sense that everything was within quota) and didn't bother looking for a better plan.
*Conservative and Lib Dem plans for Coventry, Warwickshire, and Solihull were identical, and the Green plan differed from them by a single ward.
When I visited the Commission many moons ago they showed me their computer program. This program attempts to find the minimum change solution, by which I mean the one that keeps the most seats the same. It produced some horrible redistributions which they then tinkered with before publishing as draft proposals. As others have pointed out, few of the staff have ever been specifically trained in the art of redistribution, most being ONS statisticians, and few of them enjoy the boundaries job. I assume they're still using a similar program, it saves a lot of time for people who basically can't be arsed, and their use of it has clearly influenced their policy.
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YL
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Post by YL on Jul 29, 2020 20:40:59 GMT
When I visited the Commission many moons ago they showed me their computer program. This program attempts to find the minimum change solution, by which I mean the one that keeps the most seats the same. It produced some horrible redistributions which they then tinkered with before publishing as draft proposals. As others have pointed out, few of the staff have ever been specifically trained in the art of redistribution, most being ONS statisticians, and few of them enjoy the boundaries job. I assume they're still using a similar program, it saves a lot of time for people who basically can't be arsed, and their use of it has clearly influenced their policy. You say "many moons ago"; was that before the days of the 5% rule?
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Adrian
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Post by Adrian on Jul 30, 2020 5:38:01 GMT
When I visited the Commission many moons ago they showed me their computer program. This program attempts to find the minimum change solution, by which I mean the one that keeps the most seats the same. It produced some horrible redistributions which they then tinkered with before publishing as draft proposals. As others have pointed out, few of the staff have ever been specifically trained in the art of redistribution, most being ONS statisticians, and few of them enjoy the boundaries job. I assume they're still using a similar program, it saves a lot of time for people who basically can't be arsed, and their use of it has clearly influenced their policy. You say "many moons ago"; was that before the days of the 5% rule? Oh yes, it was around 2005, towards the end of the Fifth Review, so they were doing it county by county. The software was quite impressive from the point of view that they'd integrated the boundaries and the data, but it was shall we say a pretty blunt instrument. It wasn't even able to avoid creating seats with detached parts. I suppose that's how they ended up with the delights of "Wallasey & Kirkdale" and "Mersey Banks".
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YL
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Post by YL on Jul 30, 2020 7:46:10 GMT
Oh yes, it was around 2005, towards the end of the Fifth Review, so they were doing it county by county. The software was quite impressive from the point of view that they'd integrated the boundaries and the data, but it was shall we say a pretty blunt instrument. It wasn't even able to avoid creating seats with detached parts. I suppose that's how they ended up with the delights of "Wallasey & Kirkdale" and "Mersey Banks". I don't think it would be easy to write a good program for this, given the number of possible legal configurations of wards. I guess you can't remember how the program treated wards which had been recently created by a ward review and which were split between old constituencies? E.g. Beauchief & Greenhill in Sheffield: most of it was in Heeley, but a smallish part had been in the old Dore ward so was in Hallam. Their initial proposals for the Fifth Review assigned it to Hallam, which caused trouble elsewhere, and they assigned Darnall to Heeley, a decidedly odd idea. But if they'd just realigned the existing Hallam, Heeley and Attercliffe to the new ward boundaries by placing each ward where the majority of its electorate already was they would have been about the right size (five Sheffield wards) and so needed no further adjustment. (The final proposals actually did fix both Heeley and Attercliffe that way, but Hallam got Stannington instead of Broomhill.) If the program just treated split wards as belonging to each constituency equally, rather than considering where most of their electorate was, then that might explain why the initial proposals were the way they were.
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robert1
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Post by robert1 on Jul 31, 2020 7:45:45 GMT
There will be three days of committee stage-8th and 10th September and presumably 15th. Held in Grand Committee not on the floor of the House.
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Post by cibwr on Aug 4, 2020 11:07:59 GMT
I'm not even sure what it's intended to do. It seems like it's an attempt to maintain some of the very small Welsh seats, but if you're retaining the same allocation of seats to Wales then all you're accomplishing is to create a few seats with 85,000 electors so you can have some with 60,000. If I recall correctly from the public bill committee, there was some discussion about the fact that various valleys in the south would need to be split. I'd assume the purpose of this amendment was to "fix" that. When you look on the maps you see that some valley communities are very close to each other - in adjacent valleys - but little or no communication between them, with small mountain roads at best, and no natural linkage. So rather than cross valley seats its better to follow the valley south, but it becomes increasingly difficult to stick to a rigid adherence to a 5% variance in electorate.
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