2018 Review - West Midlands

[greenchristian]

Feb 28, 2017 17:40:38 GMT Right Leaning said:

The Green Party proposal is interesting, suggesting various changes in Herefordshire and Staffordshire. It agrees with Tories and Lib Dems, for Solihull, Coventry and Warwickshire.

It complains about the problem with Birmingham, and the knock on affect to neighbouring constituencies, but then ducks out of making any recommendations, other than asking the BCE to consider using the 2018 Birmingham boundaries.

It comes up with no suggestions for the Black Country area.

Which reminds me that I never made my second post detailing our proposals. If people want, I can write the second instalment (Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire) complete with some info about how we (well, technically me) collated the local party responses into a coherent plan.

The Coventry, Solihull, and Warwickshire plan was basically drawn up on this forum (with the exception of the one North Warwickshire ward we suggested go into a Staffordshire constituency whose name temporarily escapes me). It is clearly the least change option for this part of the region.

Birmingham Green Party did draw up a plan including ward splits but no boundary-crossing for inclusion in our proposal, but they didn't submit an explanation of why they went for that proposal - so we didn't actually include it in the submission (after all, ward splits with no justification have zero chance of being accepted). The Black Country local parties didn't submit anything, and I ran out of time to add a plan for that area to our proposals before we presented them (I could probably have done it by swiping something from this thread if the person presenting the plan hadn't needed preparation time to ensure he understood what we were proposing).

[islington]

I know this is all a bit retro, and we'll all moved on from stuff like this; and it's several months too late to have any practical bearing on the process. But I thought I’d post it here in case anyone is interested.

There’s a lot of discussion upthread about the treatment of the urban West Midlands and a strong case was made for treating Coventry with Warwickshire for 8 seats, which would allow Solihull to be treated alone to receive 2 seats (which can be done nicely without ward splits).

But the implication of such an approach is that Birmingham will then be treated with Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton for 20 seats. Its entitlement is 20.05 so on the face of it, this ought to be no problem at all. But several of us struggled with it, and at first it seemed there was no way of doing it without splitting wards. But the indefatigable ASV eventually found one (24 Jun 2016, see p8), and I have an idea that EAL (or was it YL?) may have done so as well. ASV’s scheme involved a horribly convoluted Ladywood seat and several other notably awkward alignments. So in the end, it seemed that the conundrum had no acceptable solution and I settled for throwing Coventry and Solihull into the mix and producing, I felt, 25 workable seats across the W Mids met county as a whole.

But I’ve kept worrying away at it, and I’ve come up with … well, this.



In the end, my analysis of the problem is this. Birmingham has 40 wards and an entitlement to 9.19 seats. Awarding it 9 whole seats, without ward splits, would imply 5 x 4 wards plus 4 x 5 wards. The latter requirement is self-evidently impossible; in fact, a maximum of only two 5-ward seats can be formed. And one of them, Erdington, requires the detachment of Oscott ward from the rest of the city; although this has the compensation of facilitating a very neat allocation of 5 seats to Walsall and Wolverhampton.

The severance of Oscott leaves us with 39 Birmingham wards but we still can’t award 9 seats because we can’t achieve the necessary three 5-ward arrangements. The only way of making it work is to add in a Sandwell ward, which can then be combined with four Brum wards to make a seat. This gives us our third 5-ward seat; but it means that a Birmingham ward is now surplus to requirements and has to be swapped the other way. And the trouble with this is that it loads the Dudley/Sandwell area with about 8000 extra voters net (depending exactly which wards you swap), which makes it very heavy for 6 seats.

ASV exchanged Soho and Newton wards. This meant taking a huge bite out of central Birmingham and forced him to create a Ladywood seat that was contiguous and legal but terribly awkward (Ladywell, Aston, Lozells, Handsworth Wood, Newton).

Instead, I’ve swapped Handsworth Wood (farther away from the city centre) with Soho & Victoria (right next to the city centre) and this has allowed a much more compact and reasonable Ladywood seat. But I am still left with the problem that the 6 seats in Sandwell and Dudley have to be well above average size and this limits the options severely. The arrangement I’ve posted here is the least unsatisfactory solution I can find, although I admit some of the seats aren’t pretty (Dudley South is the worst).

My conclusion is that a 25-seat solution including Solihull and Coventry remains the best option.

Seats and electorates are as follows. I’ve commented on some of the issues involved, but I haven’t said anything about the seats, e.g. in Walsall and Wolverhampton, that are identical to my 25-seat W Mids plan.

ALDRIDGE (75866) – As posted before.

BIRMINGHAM ACOCKS GREEN (71550) – This is not a pretty seat; it is forced by the decision not to cross the Solihull boundary. It unfortunately involves a boundary through the middle of Yardley. The A45 Coventry Road means that Sheldon is better linked to the rest of the seat than the ungainly appearance of the map might suggest. Regarding the name, ‘Yardley’ is clearly not possible; ‘Hall Green’ is available but this ward is right at the southern end so I suggest ‘Acocks Green’ which has been used before.

BIRMINGHAM EDGBASTON (76801) – As posted before.

BIRMINGHAM ERDINGTON (77920) – As posted before.

BIRMINGHAM KINGS NORTON (71357) – As posted before.

BIRMINGHAM LADYWOOD (74276) – See comments above. It’s unfortunate to separate Handsworth Wood from Lozells & E Handsworth, but the central Handsworth area lies along the Soho Road and is kept together. And overall, this is a good compact central Birmingham seat.

BIRMINGHAM NORTHFIELD (71729) – As posted before.

BIRMINGHAM SPARKBROOK (72783) – I’m not happy with a seat stretching from King’s Heath to the M6, but what can you do? This seat is a good argument for my preferred 25-seat plan, which has a Sparkbrook seat firmly located in south east Birmingham.

BIRMINGHAM STECHFORD (71165) – Only just over the lower limit but not a bad seat; reunites Stechford but divides Yardley. You could call it ‘Hodge Hill’ but Stechford is very central and has recent history as a constituency name.

DUDLEY NORTH AND OLDBURY (77887) – The first of several seats in this area that are well above average size. The Dudley North part is fine, if you don’t mind dividing Dudley town centre; but the seat then juts deep into Sandwell almost as far as West Bromwich. Even so, it’s better than …

DUDLEY SOUTH AND ROWLEY REGIS (77596) – A classic of the ‘dumb-bell’ genre. I can’t pretend this is a good arrangement, although it just about holds together in terms of internal comms. It narrowly beats B’ham Sparkbrook as the worst seat in this plan.

HALESOWEN AND WARLEY (78408) – Perilously close to the upper limit but not too bad otherwise. An interesting oddity, for connoisseurs of this sort of thing (like me, obviously), is that it comprises two detached parts of Dudley and two detached parts of Sandwell, yet is perfectly contiguous as a whole.

STOURBRIDGE (78320) – As posted before. Now the only seat wholly in Dudley.

WALSALL NORTH (73172) – As posted before.

WALSALL SOUTH AND BILSTON (73724) – As posted before.

WEDNESBURY (72996) – I wanted to avoid creating a seat consisting of eight Sandwell wards, because it would inevitably be well below average size and would thus pile even more electors into the remaining five seats in Sandwell and Dudley (all of which have ended up within a thousand of the upper limit). But on its own merits, I’m very happy with this as a seat (and it’s the only one wholly in Sandwell).

WEST BROMWICH (78250) – A bit of a rag bag of what was left over, but I’d call it clumsy rather than outrageously awkward.

WOLVERHAMPTON NORTH EAST (74833) – As posted before.

WOLVERHAMPTON SOUTH WEST (77288) – As posted before.

Acknowledgments to several contributors here whose plans (or parts of whose plans) I’ve pillaged.

[Foggy]

Mar 9, 2017 21:24:57 GMT islington said:

I know this is all a bit retro, and we'll all moved on from stuff like this; and it's several months too late to have any practical bearing on the process. But I thought I’d post it here in case anyone is interested.

I wouldn't worry about that. I think such things are still very welcome and interesting to pore over.

I considered Warks (including Coventry & Solihull) separately for 10 seats and it wasn't pretty. My solution for the Birmingham area was to extend Selly Oak into rural Worcestershire, which is the sort of suggestion that probably just gets dismissed out of hand.

[greenchristian]

Mar 9, 2017 22:42:48 GMT Foggy said:

Mar 9, 2017 21:24:57 GMT islington said:

I know this is all a bit retro, and we'll all moved on from stuff like this; and it's several months too late to have any practical bearing on the process. But I thought I’d post it here in case anyone is interested.

I wouldn't worry about that. I think such things are still very welcome and interesting to pore over.

I considered Warks (including Coventry & Solihull) separately for 10 seats and it wasn't pretty. My solution for the Birmingham area was to extend Selly Oak into rural Worcestershire, which is the sort of suggestion that probably just gets dismissed out of hand.

What wasn't pretty about Coventry/Solihull/Warwickshire making 10 seats? It can be done perfectly well by dismembering Kenilworth 7 Southam (which was Warwickshire's left-over bits seat from the previous review). As long as you're not averse to the idea of a Kenilworth and Coventry South seat, there is literally nothing to complain about - as seen by the fact that broadly the same plan crops up in multiple submissions to the boundary commission.

[islington]

Well quite.

I have to admit I'm not wild about lumping Kenilworth in with Coventry South but let's face it, we've all seen a lot worse. And once you get past that, Warwks + Coventry works fine for eight seats and Solihull is good for two.

The problem lies elsewhere: unless you wish to encroach on Worcs or Staffs, you have to get 20 seats into the remaining five W Mids boroughs, preferably without ward splits. It's the difficulty of doing this, not any problem with Warwks/Coventry/Solihull, that is the chief argument for treating W Mids metro as a unit with 25 seats.

This is why I had another bash at it, posted the other day. It's the best solution yet, IMHO, but it's still not really satisfactory. But if you want to go for Coventry/Warwks with eight and Solihull with two, then you have either to accept my suggested 20-seat Brum & Black Country plan or put forward an alternative you feel is preferable.

[Foggy]

I had Coventry NW extending into two Bedworth wards and two N Warks ones. That leaves the other two Cov seats entirely within the city. Kenilworth is included in a very tightly drawn Warwick & Leamington, so Southam is put with Rugby. Solihull stretches from Shirley to Alcester, and 'Meriden' is whatever's left once you've done Nuneaton and Stratford.

For islington's concern I think Selly Oak extends deep into Worcestershire as part of a 'Frankley' constituency.

[greenchristian]

Mar 12, 2017 15:44:32 GMT Foggy said:

I had Coventry NW extending into two Bedworth wards and two N Warks ones. That leaves the other two Cov seats entirely within the city. Kenilworth is included in a very tightly drawn Warwick & Leamington, so Southam is put with Rugby. Solihull stretches from Shirley to Alcester, and 'Meriden' is whatever's left once you've done Nuneaton and Stratford.

That sounds less straightforward than the other way of doing it, but more electorally balanced (the last general election would have returned three Labour MPs and five Tories on those boundaries, whereas the Coventry South & Kenilworth would only have given two Labour MPs). However, when I played around with that kind of configuration, I couldn't find a way of drawing it that avoided splitting both Nuneaton and Rugby (and as you've already introduced a split in Bedworth, that's a lot of unnecessary town-splitting).

[East Anglian Lefty]

islington - whilst it negates the advantage of having 20 seats wholly within Birmingham and the Black Country, have you tried putting Longbridge in with Worcestershire and shipping Hagley the other way? I'm not sure if it'd help, but it ought to mean you're less likely to be struggling with oversized seats.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Twenty minutes doodling produces the following option, which puts Oscott in with Walsall, Longbridge with Worcestershire and assigns 9 (mostly not too dreadful) seats to the rest of Birmingham. Sandwell, Dudley and Hagley then get six ugly seats, but no worse than most attempts. I suspect there's an option without Hagley, but am too lazy to find it.



On community of interest grounds, this might be worth a look, but obviously it isn't an improvement in terms of respect for LA boundaries

[islington]

Over on the '2018 Review' thread, I've been in discussion about John Chanin, who wants to avoid crossing the Birmingham boundary and who therefore needs an 11-seat plan for the four Black Country boroughs. For reasons I've gone into on the other thread, I think this approach is flawed; but it's still an interesting exercise and I promised to post my best attempt at it, which is this ...



Aldridge and Bloxwich - 76572
Dudley and Rowley Regis - 77747
Halesowen & Warley - 73525
Kingswinford - 71054
Stourbridge - 78320
Walsall - 72074
Wednesbury - 73398
West Bromwich - 71321
Wolverhampton East and Willenhall - 72182
Wolverhampton North - 74567
Wolverhampton South - 71301

I'm actually quite happy with this as an answer to the question of how to get exactly 11 seats into this area (albeit I think that is the wrong question). It's a great shame that Palfrey ward was squeezed out of the Walsall seat; but that aside, it all works quite well. It's definitely better than the 'Brum + Black Country = 20 seats' plan I posted a few days ago. But I still think the scheme I posted on this thread back in June last year (W Mids met county = 25 seats) is the best approach, and it's what I've submitted to BCE.

My preferred plan crosses Birmingham's western border twice, and then has only three further cross-LA seats in the rest of the Black Country. This plan doesn't cross the Birmingham border at all, but has 5 seats crossing the boundaries of the Black Country boroughs. So it doesn't have any advantage, in terms of respecting LA boundaries, over my preferred plan - unless, that is, you assume that Birmingham's boundaries are somehow more important than those of other authorities.

[YL]

I think there is indeed an argument that it is less problematic to cross, say, the Sandwell border than the Birmingham one, though I suspect it is one that islington would not be very interested in. Birmingham, pace Sutton Coldfield, is a single place, a city with a clear identity, whereas Sandwell is merely an agglomeration of towns, West Bromwich, Smethwick, Tipton etc., which have been grouped together for local government purposes. That means that local ties tend to be weaker within Sandwell (except within the towns) than they do within Birmingham; a constituency which crosses, say, the Dudley/Sandwell border but contains whole towns on both sides can look like a perfectly coherent constituency which respects the local ties within the towns. On the other hand, a constituency which hives a single ward off from Birmingham will tend to break that ward's local ties and to look artificial and poorly designed.

Now, I realise that (unfortunately) the Rules only explicitly recognise local ties when they are within existing constituencies, although the sort of ties I am talking about quite often are. I also realise that the Birmingham border may not be quite as good an indication of the true border of Birmingham as a community as the above suggests. (In which case the places where it is weaker are the best places to cross the boundary if it is necessary to do so.)

Summary: some crossings of local government boundaries are better than others.

[islington]

Mar 17, 2017 8:15:24 GMT YL said:

I think there is indeed an argument that it is less problematic to cross, say, the Sandwell border than the Birmingham one, though I suspect it is one that islington would not be very interested in. Birmingham, pace Sutton Coldfield, is a single place, a city with a clear identity, whereas Sandwell is merely an agglomeration of towns, West Bromwich, Smethwick, Tipton etc., which have been grouped together for local government purposes. That means that local ties tend to be weaker within Sandwell (except within the towns) than they do within Birmingham; a constituency which crosses, say, the Dudley/Sandwell border but contains whole towns on both sides can look like a perfectly coherent constituency which respects the local ties within the towns. On the other hand, a constituency which hives a single ward off from Birmingham will tend to break that ward's local ties and to look artificial and poorly designed.

Now, I realise that (unfortunately) the Rules only explicitly recognise local ties when they are within existing constituencies, although the sort of ties I am talking about quite often are. I also realise that the Birmingham border may not be quite as good an indication of the true border of Birmingham as a community as the above suggests. (In which case the places where it is weaker are the best places to cross the boundary if it is necessary to do so.)

Summary: some crossings of local government boundaries are better than others.

Well, YL, you're correct that it's not an argument I wish to make, but that doesn't mean that I'm not interested in it or that I want to deter others from making it. 

But if it is to be made, then it should be done explicitly rather than by implication. What tends to happen at the moment is that a plan is put forward that proposes to cross the boundary of (let's say) Birmingham, and this is then objected to on the grounds that LA boundary-crossing is a bad thing. And the complainant then puts forward an alternative that involves just as many cross-LA seats, the only difference being that none of them involves Birmingham.

[YL]

Walsall & Oscott?

Yardley looks very strange.

Only one split ward that I can see in this region: Brierley Hill in Dudley. Edit: somehow I missed two in Sandwell, possibly because I didn't expect them there.

[Foggy]

Having had my expectations lowered by looking at some of the other regions first, I'm actually rather impressed at the big improvement here.

[AdminSTB]

I've seen worse and they are better than the last horrors, but they could have done so much with an Oscott split.

[woollyliberal]

Edgbaston and Selly Oak is quite large with 5 old wards. It is a sensible area though.

Birmingham Brandwood is an odd choice of name, Brandwood barely being 'a place' and yet Moseley, Kings Heath and Bournville are in the new constituency.

Yardley is a bit odd looking and stretches from the centre to the edge of the city. It is certainly better than the Birmingham Bone or Selly Oak and Halesowen, though.

[Adrian]

Just had first quick look and it looks much better. They've followed people's advice on Warwickshire, for example.

And there are split wards?!

[iain]

Outside of the Met County, they’ve done well. The Met outside Birmingham is okay. Birmingham is still pretty crap.

[AdminSTB]

Oct 17, 2017 8:51:44 GMT iain said:

Outside of the Met County, they’ve done well. The Met outside Birmingham is okay. Birmingham is still pretty crap.

It isn’t ideal, but it’s much better than it was.

[Andrew_S]

Oct 17, 2017 7:25:53 GMT woollyliberal said:

Edgbaston and Selly Oak is quite large with 5 old wards. It is a sensible area though.

Birmingham Brandwood is an odd choice of name, Brandwood barely being 'a place' and yet Moseley, Kings Heath and Bournville are in the new constituency.

Yardley is a bit odd looking and stretches from the centre to the edge of the city. It is certainly better than the Birmingham Bone or Selly Oak and Halesowen, though.

I'd be surprised if the name isn't changed.