Draft Warrington (Electoral Changes) Order 2016

David Mowat Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 General Committees

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Warrington (Electoral Changes) Order 2016.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I apologise to Members who probably think that they have better things to do on a Tuesday afternoon than talk about boundary changes in my constituency, but there are issues here. We all complain about boundaries, and although I recognise that the Boundary Commission has a tough job, it is right that it is accountable, and if it is not accountable to Parliament, what is Parliament for?

Before I go on to explain the issue, I point out that one of the by-products of the review in Warrington is a ballot paper, which I hold up for the Committee to see, that is likely to have on it 50 names, from which, three months from now, we will ask electors to choose 12. I will pass the paper around, so that colleagues can see it. I shall explain how and why that has happened, and why it is not satisfactory.

Boundary reviews can be emotional. This is not a party issue; the review covered two constituencies, mine and that of the hon. Member for Warrington North. My constituency is south of the ship canal. Warrington council is Labour-dominated: 42 of the 57 seats are Labour, and only five Tory. The area that we are talking mostly about today is south of the ship canal, where eleven out of 12 seats are Conservative or, in most cases, Liberal Democrat. So this is not about party politics; it is about what is right. I will talk about why we had to have the review—the starting point—the process that was followed, the result and the consequences, and the action that I hope the commission’s representative will take to sort the matter out at least in the short term.

As I said, the starting point is the two constituencies of Warrington North and Warrington South. The unitary council has 57 councillors spread over 22 wards. Equally significantly, there are 17 parish councils in Warrington, many of them very ancient. The parish council boundaries were, as one would expect and as is normal, aligned with the ward boundaries. Broadly speaking then, parish councillors are within wards or, as in certain instances, wards are within parishes, but the boundaries are aligned and there is no patchwork.

Although Warrington is a new town, there are a number of villages to the north and south with their own characteristics and identities. Lymm in Cheshire is a large village, with perhaps 10,000 people. To give a little historical perspective, a village called Thelwall was founded in 923 by Alfred the Great’s son. I do not think that Alfred the Great, or his son, should have too much bearing on how we draw our boundaries, but I make the point that these are ancient communities, and we are not just talking about how to divide up a town into different areas.

We needed the review because the town has grown—the 57 councillors need to become 58—and over time the ward boundaries have got out of kilter. That triggered a review under the Electoral Commission criteria. It started in May 2015, with the aim of putting in place new boundaries for the unitary and parish councils by 2016—that is, by the time of the elections coming up in three months, which will be the last in Warrington until 2020, as a result of their being all-out elections.

Everybody was happy that there should be a review and the criteria for such reviews are set out in the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. Members who might not be familiar with that Act might like to know that it establishes three criteria. First, the boundaries should be within 10% of each other. Secondly, they should maintain community identity. Thirdly, they should be a mechanism for convenient and effective local government. As for which is the most important, the Act says that there should be the “best balance” between them. That implies that they are all relevant and it is not necessarily right to focus on one rather than on all three together.

The council put in a submission to start the process of reviewing how to get 58 councillors, how to maintain a better split between the wards and how to ensure that the parish boundaries continued to be aligned to the ward boundaries. The submission had support from all three major parties on the council. I think it is accepted that it maintained the integrity of the villages, but it is also true that it did not totally meet the 10% rule. Two of the 22 wards would have had a percentage slightly different from the 10% de minimus that the Act sets out.

We then went into the process and the Boundary Commission followed its normal procedure. In my view and that of many of us involved in the process, it ignored all but the quantitative criterion—that is, it ignored the two qualitative criteria of the need for community identity and for convenient and effective local government. As a consequence, it came up with a proposal that is better than the council’s in terms of the quantitative criterion, but not greatly so. In the commission’s proposal, two of the 22 wards are also outside the plus or minus 10%, although it is also fair to say that the delta is lower. If that was the only criterion, the Boundary Commission’s submission would have been better.

The cost of getting that balance of plus or minus 10% slightly better has been extremely heavy in terms of its impact on the community and on the quality of governance, particularly south of the ship canal. I contend that the review, to all intents and purposes, used only one of the three criteria and is therefore arguably illegal under the 2009 Act. I want to talk about a couple of the issues. The first comes under the second criterion, that is, the impact on local communities. I mentioned earlier that there are a patchwork of villages surrounding the town, and the way that the boundaries have been reset rolls those villages back into the town. Lymm and Thelwall have been combined, as have Walton and Stockton Heath, Hatton and Appleton and Grappenhall and Appleton Thorn. This is a minor point, but the commission did not even rename any of the wards to acknowledge the continuing existence of some of those villages, which would have been a very small thing to give away, even if it had wanted to maintain the arithmetic of what it put together.

The third criterion is effective local governance, and at the start of the process, all parties had alignment between the parishes and the wards. If someone was a parish councillor for a ward, they would know who their borough councillors were, and so on. At the end of this process, there is no alignment. For example, Grappenhall parish council is now in three unitary wards of Appleton, Lymm and Grappenhall. Stockton Heath parish council is now in three unitary wards of Grappenhall, Appleton and Stockton Heath. There is no alignment between unitary borough council wards and the parish council wards, many of which have been there for more than 100 years. Similar issues exist in other councils, such as Walton and Appleton.

That is not the end of the problems. The next issue is the ward sizes that were determined in the Boundary Commission’s review. In Stockton Heath, it was determined that the ward would be made up of two sub-wards, one with 12 members and one with three members. In Appleton, it was three sub-wards, one with 10, one with one and one with two. No parish council in the whole of Warrington has been exempt from having ward sizes of fewer than six members. Many members of the Committee will have been councillors in their careers and will know that if a ward has 12 members, it is difficult to divvy up the work. A councillor must ask, “Do I do that or does he do that? Who is in charge of reviewing that?” That is what they are faced with in Stockton Heath—in Appleton it is 10—and in every parish in Warrington there are at least six members. It is hard to claim that that represents an adequate response to the third criteria of effective local governance.

Then we come to elections. If we have a 12-member ward, it is not hard to predict that the ballot paper could potentially have 50 names on it and we will be asking electors to select 12 names from those 50. That would be no mean feat, leaving aside the environmental issues of the size of the ballot paper and the need to stuff it into an envelope. It will cause problems, because people will put 13 crosses instead of 12. I said 50 names, but it could be 40, depending on how many candidates each of the major parties puts up. But it is a risk and—unless it was an attempt to get into the “Guinness World Records” book—it could potentially make Warrington in these elections resemble something out of a banana republic. In fact, I do not think many banana republics would have ballot papers with 50 names on them, from which electors had to choose 12—I may be wrong. I certainly do not think—although other hon. Members may wish to correct me—that any other part of the UK has ever held an election with a ballot paper of up to, or possibly more than, 50 names from which 12 must be selected.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a case for Warrington on the ludicrous solution that the Boundary Commission has come up with. My council had experience of working with the commission in 2014 to change the ward boundaries in north-west Leicestershire, and we went the other way and now have 38 single-seat wards, which is far more satisfactory for the electorate and for by-elections. We are having a by-election at the moment and, with just 1,000 or 1,100 houses in a ward, it can be done cheaply. It would be very expensive to replace an existing councillor in a 12-seat ward.

[David Mowat]

That is a good point. I had not considered the by-election point, but I agree with my hon. Friend.

It is fair to say that I am talking about parish elections. It may be that the commission makes the point that it is possible for the council to fix the boundaries by performing a local community governance review. Indeed, that is what would normally happen—the council would do that, realign the boundaries, make the parishes fit the unitary system and all would be well. The unique aspect of what has happened in Warrington is that there is no time for that to happen before the all-out elections in May. That process would take, given the statutory consultation periods required, between nine and 12 months. It cannot happen before May. I do not think the Boundary Commission intended for that to be the case, because its initial response was that that remedy was available to the council. The problem is that the remedy is not available to the council in time for the elections in May and, as a consequence, we will have the absurdity of the ballot paper that I have described.

In summary, we have two issues of substance here. First, the criteria used for the unitary review did not properly take into account the qualitative requirements of the 2009 Act in terms of community cohesion or effective local governance. As a result, there was a mishmash and an unsatisfactory answer, particularly south of the Manchester ship canal. Secondly, an unintended consequence of the non-alignment with the parish and unitary boundaries, along with an inability to fix it in time for the all-out elections that are coming up, has led to an absurd situation.

That brings the Electoral Commission into disrepute, as well as the Government: people do not understand what the commission is, and think that it is the Government, and they blame me because I am representative of the Government, as they think that it is something to do with me. All in all, that is unsatisfactory, so I would request that the commissioner withdraw the measure. I understand that there is no power to alter the order, but it should be withdrawn and resubmitted in three months’ time. We should go ahead with elections on the old boundaries, and we would have time to fix the absurdity of the ballot paper before the next all-out elections.

I look forward to hearing the response from my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon, who speaks on behalf of the commissioners, but in the meantime I should like to ask him a number of questions. Did anyone from the Boundary Commission visit the south of Warrington as part of the review, particularly the villages concerned, or was the whole thing done by someone in Millbank with a GPS system, a map and a photocopier? We have asked for clarification on that, but we have not received it. Does he agree that the 2009 Act stipulates three criteria, with a requirement to find the best balance between them? The review focuses purely on one quantitative criterion, which is potentially illegal under the Act. How many similar reviews of boundaries made no changes whatsoever between the draft and the final version? A point made to me by a number of councillors was that it was unusual not to have any changes to a boundary change review between the draft and the final version, but that was the case here and even meant renaming unitary wards to ensure that village names did not die out.

Does my hon. Friend consider that 10 or 12-member wards represent best practice in this country or anywhere else, and does he further consider that having ballot papers with up to 50 names is an acceptable way to hold elections? Pre-empting his response, given that it is not, is that not a failure under the third criterion in the 2009 Act? I shall conclude by requesting that the order is withdrawn and resubmitted after the election, enabling us to have a proper election on boundaries that are accepted. We should fix this mess after that has happened.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Mowat]

I will not detain the Committee for long. I have a couple of points in response. The hon. Member for Warrington North rightly said that there was not a major issue on her patch, although an aspect of one, and there was no meltdown. I concede there is no meltdown but that does not make it right. There will be no meltdown in Warrington South but that does not make it right, either.

I listened carefully to the arguments made by the representative of the commissioners. I have two points on that. There is a tendency, which was evident in his response, to use the word “statutory” in connection with the quantitative requirements of the Act, plus or minus 10%. In fact, the word “statutory” also applies to the qualitative parts of the Act, which are the communities and the local governance.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon mentioned a partial solution. I am sure the people of Warrington will be relieved to hear that the boundary commissioners do not intend unreasonably to withhold consent to a Boundary Commission review subsequent to the election. It might be said that that is the least they could do. It is not a partial solution just for a year, because there are all-out elections and those last four years.

Finally, the Opposition spokesman is right that the thrust of what I have said applies to parishes and the ballot paper. I make the point to colleagues, though, that when there is a unitary not a district council, which tends to be a higher level council, parishes are important and have a part to play. We should not just act as though they are not important or, if we do think that, we should abolish them.

On those grounds, I will sit down content.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Warrington (Electoral Changes) Order 2016.