Let the great boundary rejig commence

[YL]

The Northern Ireland Commission is the first to have published the submissions it received:
http://www.boundarycommission.org.uk/index/current-review/submissions.htm

The DUP and the SDLP both rant quite a bit, the latter mostly about the process (including things which are surely not the Commission's fault but the Government's) and the former more about the boundaries, although oddly they don't seem to suggest any very substantial changes.  The SDLP don't even have a proper counterproposal: they have a map showing a possible four-seat Belfast (no great surprise that they would prefer that idea) but as far as I can tell they don't fit it in to an NI-wide scheme.

[YL]

Worth pointing out that Montgomery (est. 1918) isn't that historic a constituency, at least not compared to some of the other seats going by the wayside. We're losing Anglesey/Môn and Gower, after all.

Surely, as a historic county, there's been a Montgomeryshire constituency in some form or other since way back, like Henry VIII?

Anyway, I don't see a problem with including Machynlleth in the Gwynedd seat.  The problem with the treatment of Montgomeryshire is that Glyndwr & North Powys thing, and then there's the question of what's the alternative, to which I think the answer is fragmenting Breconshire instead.

You can transfer Ystradgynlais and the surrounding area to Neath, and you can transfer a swathe of eastern Breconshire into a Monmouth and Black Mountains seat, using the links along the Usk valley as something of an excuse.  Then you can replace Glyndwr & North Powys with a Denbighshire seat which also contains St Asaph and a bit more of Wrexham district than the current proposal; I've also kept the very northernmost Powys ward in there, using the fact that part of it is historically in Denbighshire as a rather weak excuse (the real reason was to do with not wanting to remove more territory from the Powys seat in the south).  Wrexham then needs to be compensated by gaining a few wards of southern Flintshire from Alyn & Deeside.

I don't know whether this is any sort of improvement, and I haven't even considered the knock-on effects in South Wales.  However, it's quite similar to what this map (linked to by Lewis earlier) does to Powys.

[YL]

My initial reaction was that the Commission hasn't done too bad a job with Wales.

By English standards, yes.  But there are definitely things that could be improved.

(I have wondered whether the relative awfulness of the English proposals is related to the fact that the English Commission had 500 or so seats to draw whereas the others had under 100.)

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I think you correctly foresaw the likely reaction to the Powys/Ceredigion link.  (Is that any worse than the Commission's Powys/Denbighshire link?  Not sure...)

The Monmouthshire Association (a historic county group) have come up with some ideas for their area.  I don't like their names much (I'm not keen on names with two compass points) and the effect of transferring Usk into the constituency formerly known as Torfaen seems to leave the Abergavenny/Monmouth/Chepstow/Llanwern constituency strangely shaped.  But they do have a good go at the Commission's "Newport West and Sirhowy Valley".

[YL]

What I am more interested in is, "Where did you get the Google Earth ward maps from?"

http://boundaryassistant.org/PlanBuilder.htm

[YL]

Anyway, I don't see a problem with including Machynlleth in the Gwynedd seat.  The problem with the treatment of Montgomeryshire is that Glyndwr & North Powys thing, and then there's the question of what's the alternative, to which I think the answer is fragmenting Breconshire instead.

You can transfer Ystradgynlais and the surrounding area to Neath, and you can transfer a swathe of eastern Breconshire into a Monmouth and Black Mountains seat, using the links along the Usk valley as something of an excuse.  Then you can replace Glyndwr & North Powys with a Denbighshire seat which also contains St Asaph and a bit more of Wrexham district than the current proposal; I've also kept the very northernmost Powys ward in there, using the fact that part of it is historically in Denbighshire as a rather weak excuse (the real reason was to do with not wanting to remove more territory from the Powys seat in the south).  Wrexham then needs to be compensated by gaining a few wards of southern Flintshire from Alyn & Deeside.

I don't know whether this is any sort of improvement, and I haven't even considered the knock-on effects in South Wales.  However, it's quite similar to what this map (linked to by Lewis earlier) does to Powys.

OK, it is possible to draw a South Wales map within this framework.  I'm not going to submit this or anything, but here's a way of modifying Lewis's proposal to get almost all of the Powys component out of the Denbighshire seat.

Glyndwr & North Powys gains Betws yn Rhos from Conwy; St Asaph and the areas immediately east and west from Dee Estuary or whatever you want to call it; most of Wrexham borough west of Wrexham town (I don't know exactly how best to draw the line).  Then loses all Powys wards except Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant/Llansilin (using historical links as an excuse here).  Renamed Denbighshire.

Wrexham gains four southern Flintshire wards from Alyn & Deeside as compensation.

Monmouthshire loses the Newport wards.  Gains eastern Breconshire all the way to Llangynidr, Talgarth, Hay-on-Wye.  Renamed Monmouth & the Black Mountains.  (Again, the question starts to be asked whether putting Chepstow and Hay in the same seat is really an improvement.)

Newport gains the wards which were in Monmouthshire, loses Marshfield to Islwyn.

Neath gains five wards in south-west Breconshire: Tawe-Uchaf and those to the west.  It then needs to lose territory, and the least bad options I could see were Mawr to Llanelli, Pelenna to Aberavon, and (ugliness alert) the two Glyn-neath wards to Rhondda & Aberdare.

Then you have a left-over Powys constituency consisting of the rest of Breconshire, all of Radnorshire and all of Montgomeryshire except the Machynlleth area and that one bit on the northern fringe.

This is really more to show that it can be done than a serious proposal...

[YL]

The Scottish and English Commissions will publish the submissions in the next two weeks.

And now the Scottish Commission have published theirs:
https://consultation.scottishboundaries.gov.uk/representations

The interface seems a bit clunky.

[YL]

The Scottish Labour submission doesn't actually seem to make any proposals of their own.  They support the proposals in some areas, while in others (Dundee, and some of the split towns) they say that they reserve their position on counter-proposals.

The Lib Dems do have a number of counter-proposals, including one in Edinburgh which involves swapping the city centre with parts of eastern Edinburgh, a more major one in Glasgow which involves crossing the city boundary, and one including Badenoch & Strathspey rather than Nairn with Inverness and Skye.  In Fife, they want to split the Levenmouth area rather than the Howe of Fife, with the latter all staying in Cupar & St. Andrew's/North-East Fife; this seems to have a lot of support.

I couldn't find an SNP submission.  Presumably their point of view is that this review should be irrelevant.

[YL]

20,000 ish submissions

Hah.

The BCE itself says 20,000, which is a suspiciously round number....

In the newsletter on their website they say "well over 22,000".  I hope they have a better web interface than the Scottish Commission so I can find the ones for my area.

[YL]

Well, congratulations, BCE, an even less well designed process than Scotland!

I can't find a Lib Dem submission for Yorkshire and the Humber: is this a blunder by the Commission or by the Lib Dems?  (I can find comments in the Leeds transcript, which I can't agree with, but no actual submission.)  EDIT: the same is true of the Tories, but it isn't true for the parties in other regions.  EDIT: found them now; it looks like the BC forgot to label them as the official responses.

Anyway, not sure whether I really have time to read through the nearly 1000 Yorkshire submissions (mine among them somewhere), let alone those for the rest of the country.  There doesn't seem to be any sort of search engine to narrow them down a bit closer to home.

[YL]

Dok, have you seen the proposed names in submission 013694?

[YL]

Not much of interest in the Tory proposals for South Yorkshire.  They largely accept the Commission's map, except that they want to add Hemsworth (across the 1974 county border in Wakefield) to Barnsley North.  The modifications include changing the Commission's "Barnsley West and Ecclesfield" monstrosity so that it loses Darton West (its worst feature) but gains Dodworth and Kingstone.  The inclusion of Kingstone (a slice of Barnsley town proper) is pretty bad, though maybe not as bad as Darton West.

The Lib Dems are more radical.  They accept the Commission's Sheffield map (if they're not splitting wards, it's hard to do much better - but surely they should be prepared to split wards when their average size is nearly twice the width of the tolerance window) although they're not as keen as the Commission on boring compass point names, but elsewhere things are different.  They have three cross-county constituencies: a Wakefield South & Darton thing which rescues Darton West from the aformentioned monstrosity (which gains Rockingham as compensation - probably as good as it's going to get, but it still needs a new name), a Hemsworth & Royston seat, and a Goole & Thorne seat which includes the eastern end of Doncaster borough and stretches almost to Hull.  Ed Miliband's Doncaster North then gains the two Dearne wards of Barnsley borough (this is actually quite a neat seat), Doncaster "Central" gains Hatfield and Finningley (sic), and most of the rest of Doncaster borough joins parts of the current Rother Valley in a "Maltby and Don Valley" seat.  Rother Valley gets compensated with a few more wards east of Rotherham, and the Commission's Rawmarsh becomes "Mexborough and Wath" with a handful of Barnsley wards and one from Doncaster.  So they're pretty much ignoring borough boundaries: Barnsley gets 7 MPs, Sheffield 6 (as in the Commission's map), Doncaster 5 and Rotherham 4.

[YL]

Now to West Yorkshire, and the Lib Dem proposal.  I'll do this roughly by borough, though as with South Yorkshire they have a lot of cross-borough seats.  Wards from both South and North Yorkshire feature too.

As already mentioned they have two seats (Wakefield South & Darton, Hemsworth & Royston) which are mostly in Wakefield but cross into Barnsley.  They then have a Pontefract seat which includes both Pontefract and Castleford towns plus the Whitley ward from Selby district.  The core of Wakefield proper (North, West, East wards) is linked to the southern part of Leeds (Ardsley, Middleton Park) via Outwood West (but not Outwood East).

One Wakefield ward, Ossett, goes into a Dewsbury seat which is otherwise in Kirklees, and keeps the thre Dewsbury wards together with Mirfield and Kirkburton.  Their Huddersfield and Colne Valley seats are identical to the Commission's except that they sadly fail to mention Skelmanthorpe.  Most of the rest of Kirklees (excluding Batley) is in a Spen Valley seat with Wyke and Royds wards from Bradford.

In Calderdale they simply add Queensbury to Halifax and leave Calder Valley unchanged.  (This is an incredibly obvious thing to do, so of course the Commission didn't do it.)

Their Bradford is quite neat.  They have a Central seat based on the inner city parts of the current West, keeping Clayton as well and adding the two Hortons and Wibsey, and an East seat which extends northwards to add Baildon.  Then they have a Keighley which is just the current seat plus Wharfedale ward, and a Guiseley & Shipley which contains the Shipley and Bingley areas (including Heaton and Thornton & Allerton) plus the one Leeds ward which is obvious from the name.

Their Leeds, on the other hand, is not so good.  First the OK points: they have OK Pudsey and Batley & Morley seats in the south-west, and two all Leeds seats covering the inner city (Central extending east to Seacroft, and North Central stretching from Armley to Chapel Allerton).  Then the not so good: the south-east of the council area is combined with Stanley & Outwood East from Wakefield.  Then the awful: the north of the city is split into NE and NW seats both of which extend from parts of the city proper out to include swathes of rural territory either side of Harrogate.  (And neither seat acknowledges the non-Leeds components in the proposed names.)  The one thing I'd say for the LD map here is that the Commission's is even worse.

Finally, Wetherby is included with Selby (all of the latter district except that one ward which went with Pontefract).

(The Lib Dem submission for Yorkshire is reference no. 025338.)

[YL]

Now for the Tories (reference no. 025308) in West Yorkshire.

Unlike the Lib Dems and the Commission, the Tories have North Yorkshire totally unchanged; the only place the West Yorkshire boundary is crossed is Hemsworth, which they include in a Barnsley seat as already mentioned.

In the west of West Yorkshire, the Tory map is similar to the Lib Dem one.  They agree on Keighley, Calder Valley, Halifax, Huddersfield and Spen Valley, and the only difference to the Lib Dems' Bradford Central and Colne Valley is the names.  Their Dewsbury includes Wakefield Rural instead of Ossett, and their Shipley stays entirely in Bradford, taking in the northern end of the Lib Dems' Bradford East.

They have a reasonable Wakefield seat including the four Wakefield (compass point) wards, the two Outwood wards, and Crofton et al.  To the east of this they have a Normanton & Pontefract seat, while Castleford goes with two Leeds wards (Kippax, Rothwell).  Elsewhere in Leeds they have an Elmet seat stretching from Temple Newsam out to Wetherby, and fairly reasonable Leeds East and Leeds North seats.  The north-west of Leeds borough is in an Otley seat which also contains Idle & Thackley from Bradford, then there's a Pudsey seat which also includes Tong from Bradford, and a Batley & Morley seat which includes Beeston & Holbeck.

You'll notice that I haven't said where Ossett or Leeds city centre go yet.  This is because the Tories, ludicrously, have them in the same seat, which is by far the worst of their proposals.  To be fair, they do realise that it's awful, and have an alternative, which they don't seem convinced by, and which accepts the Commission's link between Leeds city centre and Outwood, and puts Ossett into Dewsbury (as per the Lib Dems), with Horbury and Hemsworth going into Wakefield.  Presumably Wakefield Rural is then put in a Barnsley seat, but I can't find details in the submission.

Neither the Lib Dems or the Tories manage to convince me that it's possible to do a decent Leeds map withouth splitting wards.  This is hardly surprising: Leeds wards are even bigger than Sheffield ones, averaging around 17,000, which is just far too big to use as building blocks when you have a tolerance interval less than half that.

The reason I haven't mentioned Labour's proposals is because they don't exist: they make a few comments on the Commission's proposals (some positive, some not so positive) but don't actually make any of their own.

[YL]

Sheffield City Council have a submission, no. 023091, with five seats wholly within the City and two three split wards.  For two alternative schemes which do the same thing (but with only two splits), see Jonathan Harston's submission, no. 002920.

[YL]

Somewhere in the London transcript is a quote from the Assistant Commissioner who says "It is not the Commission's policy to split wards"

As we knew.

However, the Yorkshire Assistant Commissioner seems quite interested in the idea, if you look at the Leeds transcripts.

Speaking of which, I've found a sensible proposal for West Yorkshire.  It's by someone called Dan Howard, who appears to have Labour connections in Kirklees, but it isn't an official Labour proposal.  (I found it because I was searching by organisation type and found a Colne Valley Labour submission endorsing it.)  It has 7 seats in Leeds without any border crossing, four in Kirklees, four in Bradford minus Queensbury, three in Wakefield excluding one ward which would go with Barnsley, and the same arrangement in Calderdale+Queensbury that the Lib Dems and Tories have.  A handful of wards are split to achieve this.  The reference number is 023075.

[YL]

Another West and South Yorkshire proposal is from Shipley Labour Party, reference no. 023128.  Like the Tory map, it's a 33 seat proposal for the two counties with no split wards, and so perhaps unsurprisingly it has a lot in common with the Tory map.  Instead of linking central Leeds with Ossett they link it with Normanton (slightly better? even worse? not sure) and instead of the Tories' Bradford East/Horsforth link they have Bradford East and Bramley (this looks a bit less random on a map, at any rate).  For their own constituency their plan is to have a Shipley and Bradford North containing Shipley, Baildon, Bingley, Windhill & Wrose, Heaton, Manningham and Toller.

[YL]

For their own constituency their plan is to have a Shipley and Bradford North containing Shipley, Baildon, Bingley, Windhill & Wrose, Heaton, Manningham and Toller.

O.K, that deserves a

I thought you might like it...

[YL]

The Boundary Commission for England has produced an Excel spreadsheet in which every constituency has a refernence number associated with it, making it easier to look at opinions/submissions on a seat-by-seat basis.

Thanks for pointing that out.

NB what it does is list submissions according to which existing constituency the respondent's address is in.

[YL]

Anyway, I looked through those for the six current Sheffield constituencies (i.e. the five with Sheffield in the name and Penistone & Stocksbridge).

- Hardly anyone is impressed.  Actually, I think no-one is impressed.
- A lot of people don't want seats crossing the City boundary.
- Further to the above, people in north Sheffield don't like the "Barnsley West & Ecclesfield" name.
- A number of people prefer traditional names to compass points.
- There aren't many actual counterproposals.

Leftbehind: see
http://consultation.boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/news/existing-constituencies-look-up-feature/
(The link is about halfway down.)

[YL]

If you want to read some good rants try looking at some of the submissions from Ellesmere Port & Neston.  (Not the first one though: that actually votes "Agree"!)

And just how many submissions are there from Al's favourite West Midlands commuter town?

[YL]

http://boundaryassistant.org/PlanBuilder.htm

I'd just like to say, that playing with that for a few hours really shows you what a difficult task the boundary commission have to do, and how awkward the ward population numbers are in some areas to build sensible constiuencies, (having said that, there's no excuse for Billericay and Dunmow)

Certainly, although:

- It was the English Commission's own decision to refuse to split wards.  The other three Commissions all have split at least one, and I'm sure the English Commission would have done a much better job in certain areas (South and West Yorkshire, north Cheshire, around Birmingham, maybe a few others) if they'd been prepared to do that.

- There's no excuse for the mess they made of Cumbria (for example), where the wards are quite small.

I think that either they basically rushed the job because they had 500 constituencies to draw in a short time using tight new rules, or they have an inexcusable lack of knowledge of the geography of certain parts of the country (see Copeland & Windermere or Consett & Barnard Castle).

[YL]

I probably said this before, but do you think a computer came up with "Colne Valley and Skelmanthorpe"?

[YL]

I probably said this before, but do you think a computer came up with "Colne Valley and Skelmanthorpe"?

I would say it's a possibility.

Put it this way - if a computer programme had been used with the instructions "Come up with names based on an algorithm using ward electorates", it's highly likely that it would have suggested something like that. See how "Tatton" disappeared - would a computer have known to keep the name "Tatton"?

But Skelmanthorpe isn't the name of a ward.  The town of that name is in Denby Dale ward and Denby Dale parish.  Maybe they should have called it "Valleys of Colne, Holme and Denby"?

The other reason I think you're wrong is that they failed to find the Tory and/or Shipley CLP counterproposals.  Both are clearly better than the initial proposals (though both still quite bad in places) and adhere to the rules better, in particular in not crossing the North Yorkshire boundary.  I think if they'd used a computer they'd have found that it was possible to avoid that, and that if they'd realised that they'd have done it.  Their West and South Yorkshire maps look to me like the work of a human desperately trying to draw constituencies in the area without splitting any wards and not really thinking about whether the results make sense.

[YL]

Welsh consultation responses are now available, including at least three by members of this forum:
http://bcomm-wales.gov.uk/2013review/consulresponse/?lang=en

Labour want a seat stretching from the Great Orme to the Shropshire border.  The Lib Dems and Plaid only seem to want major changes in the south-east.

[YL]

House of Lords reform can wait. The boundary changes can't. Clegg's stance is disappointing.

Um, why?

Having the Lib Dems, with their general belief in constitutional reform, in government ought to have been an opportunity to get somewhere with reforming the House of Lords.  That's now been lost, and I wouldn't have much confidence in another opportunity appearing.

On the other hand, the current boundaries, while they're a bit out of date and maintain the over-representation of Wales, aren't as bad as some Tories like to make out they are, and at least they don't contain horrors like the Commission's proposed Mersey Banks or Leeds NW & Nidderdale (etc. etc.; personally my view is that, unless the consultation produces a substantial improvement, the proposals should be voted down on their own merits).  I presume a review of some sort will be implemented within the next few years anyway.