BOROUGH OF

Submission by Broxbourne Borough Council Labour Group to the Local Government Boundary Commission for

Electoral Review of Broxbourne: Ward boundary consultation

This is a joint submission setting out the position of the Labour Group on Broxbourne Borough Council with regards to the ward boundaries required to represent equitably and effectively the people of the borough of Broxbourne.

We are grateful to the commission for extending its consultation deadline to allow councillors to consider a formal response at the council meeting held on 22 February 2011. In the event, we dissented in part from the proposal that the council resolved to support.

Overview

We have taken account of the ward boundary proposal chosen by the council with the support of its ruling group following cross-party discussions at the council’s Constitution Working Party.

However, we believe that the council’s proposal gives too much weight to existing polling district boundaries and not enough weight to local community identity.

In particular, while we agree with the council that the A10 dual carriageway is a good ward boundary in the south of the borough, we believe that the settlements west of the A10 would be better represented by a revised pattern of wards that more closely reflects natural boundaries.

We also believe that, in the north of the borough, town centre would be better represented if it were in one ward.

For the remainder of the borough east of the A10, we recognise that community identities are often less clearly defined, and that the council’s proposal (which largely reflects existing ward or polling district boundaries) is reasonable. Given the good levels of electoral equality proposed, we concur with the proposal in those areas.

Enclosed is a map of the borough, overlain with the current polling district boundaries (in green) alongside those of the council’s proposal (in blue) and our own proposed ward boundaries (in red).

We recognise that the names of proposed wards may be changed at later stages of the review, even if the boundaries are adopted, so we will also refer to proposed wards by numbers. For convenience of comparison, we have numbered the wards so that each overlaps, at least to a large extent, with the correspondingly numbered ward in the council’s proposal. Page 2

Electorate numbers

We have worked closely with council officers to agree, as far as practicable, calculations of the current and forecast number of electors in both proposals.

Though there is scope for different views on how to forecast the electorate five years after the completion of the review (numbers which the commission is required to take into consideration in its assessment of electoral equality), we have taken the view that the council’s own forecast of electors in each part of the borough is sufficiently reasonable and accurate to be adopted for the purposes of our own submission.

We hope that this common approach will assist the commission in comparing the two proposals.

The current electorate is calculated from the local government electors registered in the borough as at 1 December 2009 (when the last annual register was published prior to the commencement of the review), including those registered in anticipation of attaining voting age.

We share the council’s assumption that the review will conclude in 2011 and that the relevant forecast is for 2016.

Electoral growth in the borough is likely to be significantly dependent on the outcome of the council’s Local Development Framework Core Strategy, which is currently subject to formal examination.

The forecast electorate is calculated by adding to the current electorate growth assumed to be uniformly distributed in each of the units to be built on sites of five or more units in the