Ascot Labour Party
Dear Mr Ashby, Draft recommendations for Windsor and Maidenhead – input from Ascot Branch Labour Party Thank you for your March 2018 report containing your draft recommendations for new electoral arrangements, in which you made the point that the Commission would be ‘particularly interested to hear local views relating to the proposed wards during this consultation’ [ParaGraph 75]. I write to convey the views of Ascot Branch Labour Party in response to that request. Number of councillors - overall To beGin, we do not aGree with your overall recommendation to move to 42 councillors, as this introduces an unnecessary inequality between Maidenhead and Windsor in terms of the number of electors per councillor. Your earlier proposal was for 43 councillors, which was less iniquitous, reGardinG one of your principal statutory criteria, electoral equality. In fact, numerically we believe an even better solution would be to have a reduced council of 41 members, comprisinG 22 from Maidenhead and 19 from Windsor. This achieves much better equality than either 42 or 43. Number of councillors – Ascot, Sunninghill and Sunningdale Secondly, whether there are 41, 42 or 43 councillors overall, the Ascot area (Ascot, Sunninghill, Sunningdale and Cheapside) cannot equitably sustain 6 councillors, when compared to the rest of the borough. We believe your own fiGures show this quite clearly, with both of your proposed wards having a variance of -13% by 2023. Moreover, you have only achieved this by ‘encroaching’ into Old Windsor, an area which does not look to Ascot for its identity, and in fact does not have easy transport links to Ascot.
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