Your report about forthcoming Westminster constituency boundary changes (Constituency review ‘will hit Labour hard’, 29 August) suggests that only existing constituencies outside the new quota range are under threat. In fact, all constituencies (apart from the island exemptions) are under threat because changes to any constituency boundaries may have significant knock-on consequences for other seats in a region. It is not the case that seats within the quota range are necessarily going to be “saved” while others are “abolished”. All seats may be subject to significant reorganisation.
What parliament did not know when it approved the process in 2011 was how many people are missing from the electoral registers. The 2 million people added to the registers for the Europe referendum, for example, were included too late for inclusion in this review. The Electoral Commission has suggested that electoral data for boundary reviews should be based on voters registered at election times, as opposed to a date in between elections when registration levels are particularly low. Much more needs to be done to improve electoral registration, particularly of young people.
The process of constituency boundary reorganisation is now to take place every five years. This means that nobody elected in a general election can be sure that their constituency will exist again on the same boundaries. Nor will they know what those boundaries will be until early in the fourth year of a five-year parliament. The political and constitutional reform select committee in the last parliament made many sensible suggestions to improve the process, including greater flexibility over the quotas to enable more sensible constituencies to be created and then preserved.
But the only reform that would make all votes of equal value would be adoption of a voting system based on proportional representation. The failure of Tony Blair’s government to deliver the promised referendum on a PR system when it had a big majority in the House of Commons after 1997 is one reason we are left with this mess now.
Chris Rennard
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords; Co-chair, all-party parliamentary group on democratic participation
• Boundary reform will not ensure that each person’s vote is of similar value. Under the first-past-the-post system most people’s vote effectively counts for nothing, with only those in marginal seats affecting the overall outcome of the election. The Lib Dems fluffed their chance to bring about electoral reform in 2011 but we must return to the issue or parliament will never be a fair democratic representation of the public’s political sympathies.
Jonathan Wallace
Newcastle upon Tyne
• Lord Hayward’s report on the constituency boundary review appears not to have referred to the fact that it will be based on the electoral register as at December 2015, contrary to the advice of the Electoral Commission. Nor will it take into account the millions of voters who registered in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. If the government is to avoid the charge of gerrymandering, it should ensure that the new boundaries reflect the increase and distribution of the electorate on the basis of up-to-date figures.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• It is wrong for Rosie Winterton, Labour chief whip, to suggest that boundary changes are “gerrymandering” when clearly the current ratio of votes to seats heavily favours her party. The real problem is not the distribution of seats, but the electoral system itself, which massively favours Labour and the Tories, neither of whom have won more than 37% of the vote since 2001. The Labour party, if it is really committed to democratic reform, should stop complaining about gerrymandering in a system that is already heavily gerrymandered against smaller parties and embrace proportional representation.
Brian Wilson
Glossop, Derbyshire
• Labour doesn’t need to worry about Tory gerrymandering in the parliamentary boundary review. The endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership on 24 September by kamikaze Labour supporters, followed by the inevitable split that day into New Old and Old New, will hand the Conservatives more than 400 seats. Boundary reviews will be the least of mortally wounded Labour’s problems, not to mention a liberal left coalition alternative to TM4PM4ever. Thank you Jeremy, John, Diane etc.
Charles Foster
Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire
• So under the constituency review for the House of Commons in the name of a fairer democracy we cut the number of MPs by 50. Meanwhile, the House of Lords?
Barry Norman
Leeds
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