Mid Suffolk: the Boundary Commission proposes an unexpected outcome...

I had meant to mention the current Boundary Commission review of Mid Suffolk's ward boundaries, in which the District Council loses six councillors, going from forty to thirty-four, which requires, as you might guess, some interesting reshuffling.

Unlike in London, where redistributing means drawing entertaining lines of maps and crossing your fingers that the other political parties don't work out what you're doing (I do those who study these things a disservice here admittedly...), in Suffolk you have a set of building blocks known as towns and parishes. Rule one is, "thou shalt not split up parishes", which simplifies and complicates the process in equal measure.

The job of the Boundary Commission is thus to create a number of wards which have an amount of electors within 10% of the average number of electors per councillor. That can be done by means of one member or two member wards, but you don't want them to be too large in geographic terms.

There were three political proposals made, one from the Greens, one from the Conservatives and one from us. You'll notice that there wasn't a proposal from Labour, but as they don't actually have a councillor in Mid Suffolk, I guess that they weren't that bothered. Slightly bizarrely, our local Green councillor admitted that they had agreed a joint proposal with the Conservatives, but that the Conservatives had reneged on the deal late in the day. That does beg the question as to why the Greens thought that doing a deal with the Conservatives was a good idea, but it does perhaps indicate that the Greens are either more naive than I had thought possible or, more troubling my, that they might not be reliable in their opposition to the ruling administration.

In any event, none of the three proposals seemed to have an awful lot to recommend them. The Conservative proposal required there to be thirty-five councillors, i.e. one more than the specified number, which perhaps serves as a reminder as to the quality of some of the local Conservatives. The Green proposals, for there turned out to be two versions, seemed not to understand the importance of the 10% variance from the mean, as they often failed by producing wards that were too big or too small. The Liberal Democrat proposal was better, but still not ideal.

It appears that the Boundary Commission weren't wildly impressed either, as their draft proposals, issued on Monday, differ from all of them. And, from an initial look, I reckon that they've done a pretty good job.

From a personal perspective, the most interesting element is the one that affects me most. And it wasn't what I was expecting...