Sunday, June 17, 2007

New Parliametary Boundaries

The change of Prime Minister from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown on June 27th will also see the implementation of the new parliamentary boundaries. On the new boundaries will also see an increase in seats from the existing 646 to 650. Within Merton, we'll only see minor boundary changes affecting roughly 1000 people who'll shift between both constituencies as a result of the re-alignment of boundaries with wards(mainly in the Colliers Wood area where the Savacentre and Merton Abbey Mills will move from Wimbledon to Mitcham and Morden). This will have a relatively minor impact, though it will make Mitcham and Morden a slightly safer Labour seat by a few hundred votes and Wimbledon slightly more difficult for Labour.

Overall the boundaries will result in a slight decrease in the notional Labour majority when we fight the next election, it's estimated that Labour would've had a majority of 46 if the new boundaries had been fought at the last election.

The main problem with the new boundaries is that they're based on 2000 electorates and are already seven years out of date(and likely to be 9-10 years when the next election is fought. In London, some electorates on the new boundaries have nearly 90,000 electors and if it the seats were reviewed now we would see an increase in seats for London as significant population growth has taken place since 2000 especially in East London. The next review will not report until between 2015-2019 and the disparities are likely to grow significantly worse along with under-representation in London, personally the whole boundary review process does need looking at again with faster reviews and predicted population growth taken into account.

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