The 2013 Review of Parliamentary constituency boundaries
The Boundary Commission for England is an independent and impartial public body, which reviews all Parliamentary constituency boundaries in England every five years. The current review – which must report to Parliament by October 2013 – is being carried out under new rules laid down in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011.
What’s changing?
The new rules mean there will be substantial changes to Parliamentary constituencies in England. These include:
- reducing the total number of constituencies from 533 to 502; and
- making sure that each constituency contains a similar number of registered electors.
How did we work out our proposals?
We first calculated the electoral quota. This is the number of registered electors in the UK divided by the number of constituencies (not including four exempt constituencies – please see A guide to the 2013 Review for more details on how the electoral quota is worked out).
The current electoral quota is 76,641. Every constituency – except two covering the Isle of Wight – must have a number of registered electors that is no more than 5% lower or higher than this figure. In practice, this means constituencies must contain between 72,810 and 80,473 electors.
Using the quota, we allocated constituencies among the nine regions of England. Within these regions, it was not always possible to allocate whole numbers of constituencies to individual counties. In such cases, we grouped some local authority areas into sub-regions and allocated constituencies within them. This means that in some instances, we have had to propose constituencies that cross county or unitary authority boundaries.
Why did we want your views?
The final shape of the new constituency boundaries will be informed by consultation. We held the first of a series of consultations from September to December 2011. This enabled us to hear people’s comments, whether in support of or objection to our initial proposals. We then published all the comments received and sought views on those from 6 March to 3 April 2012. Once all these representations had been considered we published our revised proposals on 16 October 2012 and held an eight week consultation on them. Once we have considered the comments received we will make our final recommendations by 1 October 2013.
You can find more details about the conduct of the 2013 Review by reading A guide to the 2013 Review.
To read more about the proposed constituency boundaries in your area, choose a region from the left-hand menu.
