Final Recommendations on the New Electoral Arrangements for East Sussex County Council
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Final recommendations on the new electoral arrangements for East Sussex County Council Electoral review September 2016 Translations and other formats To get this report in another language or in a large-print or Braille version contact the Local Government Boundary Commission for England: Tel: 0330 500 1525 Email: [email protected] The mapping in this report is reproduced from OS mapping by the Local Government Boundary Commission for England with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, © Crown Copyright. Unauthorised reproduction infringes Crown Copyright and may lead to prosecution or civil proceedings. Licence Number: GD 100049926 2016 Contents Summary 1 1 Introduction 3 2 Analysis and final recommendations 5 Submissions received 5 Electorate figures 5 Number of councillors 6 Division boundaries consultation 6 Draft recommendations consultation 7 Final recommendations 7 Eastbourne 8 Hastings 10 Lewes 11 Rother 13 Wealden 15 Conclusions 18 Parish electoral arrangements 19 3 What happens next? 25 Appendices A Table A1: Final recommendations for East Sussex 26 County Council B Submissions received 31 C Outline map 32 D Glossary and abbreviations 34 1 Summary Who we are and what we do The Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) is an independent body set up by Parliament. We are not part of government or any political party. We are accountable to Parliament through a committee of MPs chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons. Our main role is to carry out electoral reviews of local authorities throughout England. Electoral review An electoral review examines and proposes new electoral arrangements for a local authority. A local authority’s electoral arrangements decide: How many councillors are needed How many wards or electoral divisions should there be, where are their boundaries and what should they be called How many councillors should represent each ward or division Why East Sussex? We are conducting an electoral review of East Sussex County Council and all its districts as the value of each vote in council elections varies depending on where you live in East Sussex. Some councillors currently represent many more or many fewer voters than others. This is ‘electoral inequality’. In East Sussex, 34% of divisions have a variance greater than 10%; our aim is to create ‘electoral equality’, where votes are as equal as possible, ideally within 10% of being exactly equal. Our proposals for East Sussex East Sussex should be represented by 50 councillors, one more than now East Sussex should have 50 divisions, six more than now The boundaries of 35 divisions will change, nine will stay the same We have now finalised our recommendations for electoral arrangements for East Sussex. 1 What is the Local Government Boundary Commission for England? The Local Government Boundary Commission for England is an independent body set up by Parliament.1 The members of the Commission are: Professor Colin Mellors (Chair) Dr Peter Knight CBE, DL Alison Lowton Peter Maddison QPM Sir Tony Redmond Professor Paul Wiles CB Chief Executive: Jolyon Jackson CBE 1 Under the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. 2 1 Introduction 1 This electoral review was carried out to ensure that: The divisions in East Sussex county are in the best possible places to help the Council carry out its responsibilities effectively The number of voters represented by each councillor is approximately the same across the county. What is an electoral review? 2 Our three main considerations are to: Improve electoral equality by equalising the number of electors each councillor represents Reflect community identity Provide for effective and convenient local government 3 Our task is to strike the best balance between them when making our recommendations. Our powers, as well as the guidance we have provided for electoral reviews and further information on the review process, can be found on our website at www.lgbce.org.uk Consultation 4 We wrote to the Council to ask its views on the appropriate number of councillors for East Sussex. We then held two periods of consultation on division patterns for the county. The submissions received during consultation informed our draft and final recommendations. This review is being conducted as follows: Stage starts Description 8 September 2015 Number of councillors decided 22 September 2015 Start of consultation seeking views on new divisions 30 November 2015 End of consultation; we begin analysing submissions and forming draft recommendations 15 March 2016 Publication of draft recommendations, start of second consultation 16 June 2016 End of consultation; we begin analysing submissions and forming final recommendations 27 September 2016 Publication of final recommendations How will the recommendations affect you? 5 The recommendations will determine how many councillors will serve on the Council. They will also decide which division you vote in and which other communities are in that division. Your division name may also change. 3 4 2 Analysis and final recommendations 6 Legislation2 states that our recommendations should not be based only on how many electors3 there are now, but also on how many there are likely to be in the five years after the publication of our final recommendations. We must also try to recommend strong, clearly identifiable boundaries for our divisions. 7 In reality, we are unlikely to be able to create divisions with exactly the same number of electors in each; we have to be flexible. However, we try to keep the number of electors represented by each councillor as close to the average for the council as possible. 8 We work out the average number of electors per councillor for each individual local authority by dividing the electorate by the number of councillors, as shown on the table below. 2015 2021 Electorate of East Sussex 397,253 431,902 Number of councillors 50 50 Average number of 7,945 8,638 electors per councillor 9 When the number of electors per councillor in a division is within 10% of the average for the authority, we refer to the ward as having ‘electoral equality’. Forty- eight of our new divisions for East Sussex will have electoral equality by 2021. 10 Our recommendations cannot affect the external boundaries of East Sussex or result in changes to postcodes or local taxes. They do not take into account parliamentary constituency boundaries. We have seen no evidence to suggest that our recommendations will have an effect on house prices or car and house insurance premiums and we are not able to take into account any representations which are based on these issues. Submissions received 11 See Appendix B for details of submissions received. All submissions may be viewed at our offices and on our website at www.lgbce.org.uk Electorate figures 12 The Council submitted electorate forecasts for 2021, a period five years on from the scheduled publication of our final recommendations in 2016. These forecasts were broken down to polling district levels and predicted an increase in the electorate of around 8.7% to 2021. This growth is being driven by new developments, particularly in the Lewes, Newhaven, Bexhill, Arlington and Hailsham areas 2 Schedule 2 to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. 3 Electors refers to the number of people registered to vote, not the whole adult population. 5 13 We considered the information provided by the Council and are satisfied that the projected figures are the best available at the present time. We used these figures to produce our draft and final recommendations. Number of councillors 14 East Sussex County Council currently has 49 councillors. We have looked at evidence provided by the Council and have concluded that the Council’s submission was supported by evidence to justify increasing the current council size, and that 50 was the most appropriate number of councillors, as it allows for coterminosity between wards and county divisions. We are content that the Council has sufficiently demonstrated that the authority can operate efficiently and effectively under this council size and ensure effective representation of local residents. 15 We therefore invited proposals for new patterns of divisions that would be represented by 50 councillors. 16 We received no submissions about the number of councillors in response to either our consultation on ward patterns or on our draft recommendations. We have therefore based our final recommendations on a 50-member council, allocated across the districts and boroughs in East Sussex as shown in the table below. 17 In developing our recommendations for the County, the Commission also sought to achieve a good level of coterminosity between the county divisions and district ward boundaries. This figure, in the last column of the table below, shows to what extent, once the district council have elected upon their new ward boundaries in 2019, their district wards will be wholly contained within their county divisions. We refer to this as coterminosity. No. County Coterminosity with District Councillors County by 2019 Eastbourne Borough 9 100% Hastings Borough 8 100% Lewes District 9 67% Rother District 9 62% Wealden District 15 95% East Sussex County Total 50 Division boundaries consultation 18 We received 27 submissions during our consultation on division boundaries, including one county-wide proposal from the County Council. The remainder of the submissions provided localised comments for division arrangements in particular areas of the county. 19 The county-wide scheme provided a pattern of all single-member divisions for the county. Having carefully considered the proposals received, we were of the view that the proposed patterns of divisions largely resulted in good levels of electoral equality in most areas of the county and generally used clearly identifiable boundaries. However, there are areas in which we recommended changes to provide 6 stronger boundaries.