Memorandum by Kent County Council (WB
04)
1. As a result of its experience during
the Periodic Electoral Review of its electoral arrangements (completed
last August), the County Council has strong views, not only on
the Electoral Commission's statutory criteria, but also on how
these criteria are applied in practice by the Boundary Committee
for England (BCFE) and the Electoral Commission. The County Council
therefore wishes to submit the following evidence to the ODPM
Committee's enquiry into Ward Boundaries.
2. First, the County Council found that
the emphasis which the Electoral Commission gives to co-terminosity
between County Electoral Divisions and District Wards meant that
we (and the BCFE) were forced to use District Wards as building
blocks for County Electoral Divisions. However, in many areas,
District Wards do not easily lend themselves to this purpose,
because:—
— there are significant differences
in the size of District Wards (in electoral terms) between Districts;
— multi-Member District Wards are often
so large that they severely limit options for creating County
Electoral Divisions; and
— District Wards reflect District Council
circumstances, and the County Councils, although consultees on
District PERs, have little real influence over them, even though
they then become of the utmost importance to the County Council
for its own PER.
3. The Electoral Commission's decision on
new electoral arrangements for Kent included 12 two-Member County
Electoral Divisions. The Council would very much prefer to have
had single-Member Divisions throughout, but the emphasis on co-terminosity,
given the pattern of District Wards in urban areas, meant that
there was often little choice but to accept two-Member Divisions.
4. For these reasons, the Council feels
that the emphasis placed by the Electoral Commission on co-terminosity
between County Electoral Divisions and District Wards should be
removed. Instead, a more flexible approach should be adopted using
Polling Districts as the basic building block. Polling Districts
have two distinct advantages:-
(a) being small-scale they would allow a
variety of permutations for the creation of County Electoral Divisions,
enabling good electoral equality and community identity to be
more easily and more widely achieved, and removing the need for
two-Member Divisions in urban areas; and
(b) they are universal, covering both urban
and rural areas.
5. Second, the County Council feels that
the need to group County Electoral Divisions together on a District
basis is no longer appropriate since ancient District Council
boundaries often fail to reflect modern realities where a single
urban community now finds itself divided by such a boundary.
6. Third, as we commented to the BCFE in
our response to their draft recommendations on our PER, the County
Council was most concerned that, in formulating its recommendations,
the BCFE had been inconsistent in its application of the statutory
rules and the Electoral Commission's Guidance. In the Council's
view, the BCFE had chosen, on an arbitrary basis, sometimes to
give precedence to co-terminosity over electoral equality; and
at other times to give precedence to what it claimed was "community
identity" (although the Council thought that it was in a
better position than the BCFE to judge that) over both electoral
equality and co-terminosity.
|
