SUFFOLK COASTAL AND WAVENEY DISTRICT COUNCILS Joint Response to LGBCE Consultation on Proposed New Electoral Arrangement for: EAST SUFFOLK COUNCIL Overview Overall, Suffolk Coastal and Waveney District Councils (the east Suffolk councils) welcome and support the recommendations made by the Local Government Boundary Commission for the district ward arrangements for East Suffolk Council. We note that the vast majority of the recommendations are in line with our proposals, as laid out in our response of Friday, 4 May 2018 which can be viewed at: http://apps.eastsuffolk.gov.uk/committeeminutes/readdocument.asp?docid=22852 , together with the supporting evidence. We see the recommendations from the Boundary Commission as being positive and in line with local requirements to effectively govern the new East Suffolk Council. For the sake of brevity, this response should be seen as broad agreement on all of the recommendations – apart for the exceptions that we have highlighted below (with our detailed response/suggestions for each): Ward no. 1 - Beccles & Worlingham The Boundary Commission proposed to create a three-councillor Beccles and Worlingham Ward. Although the east Suffolk councils recognise that this addresses the slight variance issue caused by keeping Beccles as a two-councillor self-contained ward (comprising of the Beccles parish only), we remain strongly committed to our original proposals of having two separate wards in this area. There is strong feeling in the area that Worlingham should not be ‘subsumed’ into Beccles, demonstrated by a campaign launched last year (see https://www.facebook.com/Death-of-our-village-109847156378796/) on the reaction to the first draft of the Waveney Local Plan. Worlingham Parish Council launched a campaign named ‘Death of our village’ in response to proposals which they cited would destroy the ‘character, uniqueness, community and balance’ of the area. The smaller rural parishes of North Cove and Barnby are even lesser linked to Beccles and we feel it would be a better solution to keep these as a separate represented ward to Beccles which is a much larger market town. Ward no. 7 - Deben & Ore The councils’ response to this ward proposal applies to the name only. ‘Deben & Ore’ was used on our draft submission but in our final submission to the Boundary Commission our preferred name for this ward was simply ‘Deben’. We would like to re-affirm our preferred name of ‘Deben’ for this ward. It is a simpler, shorter name and reflects the area better – the main part of the River Ore actually runs through Orford, which is not located in this ward geographically, and therefore the inclusion of ‘Ore’ in the title could cause confusion. Ward no. 27 – Wainford The councils’ response to this ward proposal applies to the name only. Although our final submission proposed the name of Wainford for this ward, we feel that this should be amended to ‘Bungay & Wainford’. We feel that the name should include Bungay, as it is the principal town within the ward. However, we also recognise that retaining ‘Wainford’ as part of the ward name does represent the wider ward area. As such, we believe that ‘Bungay & Wainford’ is an appropriate name for the ward, which will prevent possible voter confusion. .