Manipulating Territories: British Political Parties and New Parliamentary Constituencies

Abstract

In 2011 the UK Parliament introduced a new set of rules and timetable for the redistribution of Parliamentary constituencies, which also included a new procedure for public consultation on the Boundary Commissions' proposals. The first redistribution under this new regime began in 2011, and an extensive series of Public Hearings and submission of written representations took place in late 2011 and early 2012. During the consultation, the political parties—as under the previous regimes—sought changes to the proposals that would better serve their electoral interests. This paper evaluates the extent to which their counter-proposals were able to achieve that end, given the reduced degrees of freedom provided by the new rules and other geographical constraints. At best, each party might have been able to change the number of seats it might win by about 10–12, out of 600.

Extracto

En 2011 el Parlamento británico introdujo un nuevo reglamento y calendario para la redistribución de las circunscripciones parlamentarias, que también incluía un nuevo método para la consulta pública sobre las propuestas de las comisiones responsables. La primera redistribución con este nuevo sistema empezó en 2011, y a finales de 2011 y principios de 2012 tuvieron lugar una larga serie de audiencias públicas y representaciones por escrito. Al igual que en sistemas anteriores, durante la consulta los partidos políticos buscaron cambios a las propuestas que sirvieran mejor a sus intereses electorales. En este artículo se valora en qué medida sus contrapropuestas consiguieron lograr este fin, teniendo en cuenta el menor grado de libertad que permiten las nuevas normas y otras limitaciones geográficas.

摘要

2011年时，英国国会引进了一系列国会选区重分配的新规则与时程表，同时包含了选区边界委员会提案公共谘询的新程序。在此一崭新的制度之下，2011年开始进行重分配，而密集的公众听证会与书面陈述递交则肇发于2011年末至2012年初。谘询期间，过往制度下的各个政党企图寻求改变该提案，以获取自身更佳的选举利益。本文评估在新制度有限的自由度与其他地理限制之下，他们的反对提案得以达到上述目的之程度。

Résumé

En 2011, le Parlement du Royaume-Uni a introduit de nouvelles règles et un nouveau calendrier pour le redécoupage des limites des circonscriptions électorales, ce qui a compris aussi une nouvelle procédure en faveur de la consultation publique sur les propositions de la Boundary Commission (commission chargée du redécoupage des limites des circonscriptions électorales). Sous ce nouveau régime, le premier redécoupage a été mis en place en 2011, et une importante série d'audiences publiques et une présentation des observations par écrit ont eu lieu à la fin de 2011 et au début de 2012. Pendant la consultation, les partis politiques—comme ce fut le cas sous des régimes antérieurs—ont demandé des modifications aux propositions susceptibles de mieux répondre à l'intérêt de l’électorat. Ce présent article évalue jusqu’à quel point les contre-propositions pourraient réaliser les fins, étant donné la baisse de la liberté de manoeuvre qu'entraînent les nouvelles règles et d'autres limites géographiques.

Keywords:

• Boundaries
• democracy
• political geography
• territorial
• elections
• UK

Acknowledgements

Financial support for the research underpinning this paper has been provided by the British Academy (Grant 111341), which is gratefully acknowledged. We are also grateful to officials of the three main British political parties (Greg Cook, Rob Hayward, Roger Pratt and Tom Smithard) and to the Secretaries of the four Boundary Commissions for their collaboration in that work. We are also very grateful to Anthony Wells for his calculations of the likely outcome of the 2010 election in different sets of constituencies.

Notes

1. The 1944 Act required all constituencies to have electorates within ±25% of the national quota, but the Boundary Commissions reported that this was not feasible given the other requirement to mesh constituency boundaries with those of the local authorities (of which there were many more—and many of them very small—then than after the comprehensive reviews of local government in the 1960s–1970s and 1990s–2000s).

2. The exceptions are two small constituencies in Scotland—Orkney and Shetland, with an electorate in 2010 of 33,085) and Na h-Eileanan an Iar in the Outer Hebrides (electorate, 21,780)—and the Isle of Wight (2010 electorate, 109,922), which the Act required to be divided into two constituencies. (The national average was 76,641.)

3. The transcripts of the Public Hearings and the written representations are all available on the respective Commissions' websites at: http://consultation.boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/have-your-say/; http://www.boundarycommission.org.uk/index/current-review.htm (Northern Ireland); https://consultation.scottishboundaries.gov.uk/; and http://bcomm-wales.gov.uk/2013review/consulresponse/?lang=en.

4. This is an intriguing final comment since, later on the same day that the national party official presented this statement ‘on behalf of the Labour party and North East region of the Labour Party’, a submission by Nick Brown, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East (and a former Cabinet Minister and Chief Whip) presented an alternative scheme for five constituencies in Newcastle and parts of Northumberland and North Tyneside which was subsequently endorsed by the other four Labour MPs currently representing seats in that area. In the letter accompanying his later written submissions, Mr Brown, in effect, accused his opponents of seeking to gerrymander Newcastle's constituencies:

… the Liberal Democrat proposal takes all the Newcastle Local Authority wards that they won in the council elections this year (2011) and puts them into a single Parliamentary seat, along with other local authority wards that they marginally lost. Under their proposal the other Parliamentary constituencies are brigaded together around the principal purpose, which is to create a Parliamentary seat they might win at a General Election. This is not how Parliamentary boundaries should be decided.

The proposal submitted by the Conservative Party is open to a similar charge in respect of the Tynemouth constituency.

The proposal that I have submitted is not open to this charge. The principal merits of my proposal are that each constituency has a clear successor seat, 85% of registered voters would be in the logical successor seat to the one they are in currently, and the boundaries are clear natural lines, mostly following the major highway network, and conforming as far as logically possible to the existing boundaries.

5. If a party on average lost a marginal seat in the Commissions' proposals with 20,000 votes, and in its counter-proposals won it by a majority of 1000, then of those 20,000 wasted votes 19,000 become effective and 1000 surplus. If it can change 12 seats from marginal losses to marginal victories, therefore, it reduces its wasted vote total by 228,000 while increasing the surplus vote total by only 11,988.

6. We are grateful to Galina Borisyuk for calculating the biases reported in Table 7.

7. Watford was one of the very small number of ‘three-way marginals’ in the 2010 election results, where the gap between the first two parties was less than five percentage points and that between the second and third less than ten points (Rallings and Thrasher, 2011, p. 218). Labour won Watford with 33.6% of the votes in 2005, against 31.2 and 29.6%, respectively, for the Liberal Democrat and Conservative candidates.

8. This quotation is from the Boundary Commission for England's A Guide to the 2013 Review, paragraph 31 (available at http://rr-bce-static.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/406678_Guide-to-the-2013-Review_acc.pdf?9d7bd4).

9. This statement is reported in the minutes of the first meeting between the Commission and representatives of the political parties in April 2011 (para 15)— these are available at http://rr-bce-static.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Political-Parties-Meeting-4-April-2011-as-published.pdf?9d7bd4.

10. Although the Conservative party did not include split wards in any of its counter-proposals, one put forward for Gloucester by the local party did. This was not endorsed in the document presented by the Boundary Review Manager; instead it requested the Commission ‘pay serious attention’ to that counter-proposal.

11. In their written submission the Liberal Democrats stated that ‘We believe that it is convenient, where practical, not to divide Council wards between constituencies, but the integrity of ward boundaries and even Council boundaries is less important than the integrity of natural communities’ and the Conservatives that ‘it is sensible to build constituencies from current wards, as far as is possible and reasonable’. And in his written statement—which contained no counter-proposals—Labour's Scottish General Secretary noted that the Commission had sought to minimise ward-splitting and continued that this is ‘a strength of the proposals, especially as where the Commission has divided wards it has done so by using either existing constituency boundaries, community council boundaries or clearly identifiable features such as main roads and uninhabited areas’.

12. If at all. Because of difficulties within the coalition government over House of Lords reform the Liberal Democrats indicated in summer 2012 that they would vote against implementation of the new constituencies, and in early 2013 Parliament debated whether the exercise should be delayed until 2018.