The review of parliamentary boundaries currently grinding into gear is going to produce some major changes...but probably not so much in the three southern regions of England.
That's in part because these are growing rural and suburban regions which, by and large, have larger constituencies already which need relatively little alteration for them to comply with the new requirements.
Let's recap briefly on what those requirements are. Parliament has obliged the Boundary Commission to come up with a pattern of constituencies for a 602 seat House of Commons, down from the current 650.
Why 602? It was planned to be 600, entirely arbitrarily, but at the last minute the Government agreed to provide two (small) constituencies entirely within the Isle of Wight instead of the current (huge) single seat for this island. So they were taken out of the calculations. This is the first time the House of Commons has had a cap placed on its size, similar to the US House of Representatives. And that means each region has a set number of seats:
* South East: 81 plus 2 Isle of Wight seats (currently 84)
* South West: 53 (currently 55)
* Eastern: 56 (currently 58)
That's the first big difference about this review.
The second is the far tighter electorate range constituencies can now have. With a few exceptions, every seat can only deviate 5% either side of an ideal electorate of 76,641. So the range is 72,810 to 80,473. Any seat outside that range will have to be altered. Even if your seat is within it, it may not escape unaltered because of knock-on changes needed elsewhere. And of course urban seats where Labour is strong tend to be the ones losing population (that's not universally the case, but in general), while growing suburban seats tend to vote Conservative. But it applies in the South too - do not assume Labour's ten southern seats are safe.
The third change is that the only boundaries that are now set in stone are regional. No constituency may span regions. But they can, for the first time, cross counties. They can even split wards if need be (though the presumption will be to avoid this unless absolutely necessary). And it will be a feature of this review that counties will be paired together - even here in the south. We can say which counties will in all likelihood be paired:
* Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire
* Cambridgeshire and Norfolk
* Cornwall and Devon
* Dorset and Somerset
* Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire
We can even say with a reasonable degree of accuracy which current seats are going to be abolished (but you'll have to wait a bit longer for that). Bar Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, each of those couplings loses one seat between them. If your county's not one of those twinned ten, it's probably going to survive unpaired. But that doesn't mean it survives unscathed. The three biggest southern counties - lose one seat each without being paired:
* Essex
* Kent
* Hampshire
And even if your county doesn't lose a seat and isn't paired, it may well not survive without radical change. East Sussex is one such example: it has six seats now and it will have six seats after the review. But the seats at the Brighton end of the county are too small, while those at the Hastings end are too large. So there has to be some fairly radical surgery there as well.
Bear this in mind: while getting every seat within range of 76,000 voters is the over-riding priority for the commission that does not mean that it will not have care, where it can, to respect natural boundaries, to avoid splitting towns in two, to try to avoid splitting wards wherever possible; and to avoid bringing too many districts together in one seat. It would need exceptional circumstances indeed for any new constituency to cross four different local authorities (under current boundaries only Arundel and South Downs does), and ideally no more than two will be the goal.
Over the next few weeks Southern Front will look in more detail at the impact the boundary review is likely to have on the three southern regions, focussing on some of the affected counties to look at what the political impact might be. Of course, there are many different ways to slice an orange, and many different ways to draw a boundary. But not so many that we cannot make some broad guesses about how the direction the commission might take.
The Boundary Commission has just published a . so check back here every few days for our look at where the boundary review could terminate or launch a political career or two.
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