Labour has called for the government to halt its shakeup of parliamentary constituencies, arguing that the rush of new voters before the EU referendum means the proposed changes will be out of date and “an affront to democracy”.
The plan to trim the UK’s 650 Commons seats to 600 and balance the number of registered voters in each has been in train since 2011. The boundary commissions for England and Wales will publish their initial recommendations on Tuesday.
Those recommendations will form the bulk of what is being billed as the most extensive shakeup of Commons boundaries in the postwar era, with 43 of the 50 seats to be abolished being located in England and Wales, and hundreds more seeing major changes.
Labour, which is forecast to see the greatest turbulence in its seats, has called for the process to be delayed to allow the constituency changes to be based on more up-to-date data.
The 2011 Act which began the process decreed that the independent electoral commissioners for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should base their calculations on electoral registration snapshots from December 2015.
But since then more than 2 million voters have joined the rolls across the UK, a rush of new voters inspired in part by June’s Brexit referendum.
Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s shadow minister without portfolio, said these new voters “have been ignored and left out of the calculations”.
He said: “What’s more, justifying cutting 50 MPs to save money while stuffing the House of Lords with may more peers is completely hypocritical. The whole approach is an affront to democracy and the government should abandon these proposals.”
Supporters of the process dismiss charges of unfairness, saying that the new electors are mainly distributed across the country, with three-quarters of seats seeing voter numbers change within two percentage points on the national average.
They also stress that using a new data set would require a change to legislation, and most likely see a 2020 general election run under the old system.
What is certain is that news of the reviews will be anxiously awaited by many English and Welsh MPs, who will be handed a copy of the relevant results in advance, from midday on Monday.
The first proposals to be published, concerning Northern Ireland seats, were released last week. While only one seat has gone, from 18 to 17, every constituency has changed, many significantly.
England and Wales are likely to see even more turbulence, with the number of English constituencies falling from 533 to 501, and Wales losing more than a quarter of is seats, from 40 to 29.
The cull is happening to try to make all the new seats, apart from a handful of exceptions, contain somewhere near the average number of voters, a figure of 74,679, with a leeway of just 5% above or below.
At a briefing ahead of its findings, Sam Hartley, secretary for the Boundaries Commission for England, said English constituencies currently ranged from about 55,000 to 95,000 voters.
“This means that the scale of the change is going to be significant,” he said, calling the reorganisation the biggest since the modern boundary review system was incorporated in 1944.
Asked about the 2 million new electors, Hartley said the commission was obliged under law to use the 2015 data. However, he added, constituencies could be rejigged within the 5% limit to take account of the changes.
The proposed new constituencies will see significant consultation and review before anything is confirmed, with public meetings in October and November and submissions being accepted until December.
The final recommendations will be submitted in September 2018, and so would be in place for an election in 2020.
An analysis of the likely nationwide shakeup has shown that of the 50 constituencies disappearing, 30 could be those currently held by Labour, with 200 of the party’s seats affected by the changes.
Lord Hayward, a Conservative peer and expert on the boundary review, said this would happen because Labour seats currently tend to be smaller than average.
Labour has nonetheless accused the government of “gerrymandering” with the reviews.
A Conservative spokesman dismissed the new call to halt the process. “This is a cynical delaying tactic – in the last parliament, Labour and Liberal Democrats conspired to delay the boundary review, legislating to push it back to 2018,” he said.
“They are now trying to find new excuses to push it back, yet doing so would mean the next general election will be fought on incredibly outdated constituencies.”
- This article was amended on 12 September 2016 to clarify the number of seats being abolished in England and Wales, and the number being abolished across the UK.
