Cambridgeshire Boundary Commission Proposals Published

The Boundary commission has published it's proposed changes across Cambridgeshire in order to make MP's constituencies roughly balanced with somewhere between 72,810 and 80,473 electors. At the same time the number of constituencies (and therefore MP's) will be reduced to 600, in England this will mean a reduction from 533 to 502.

Here in Cambridge there is no change at all the only slight exception to this being that Queen Ediths will now sit in a slightly reconfigured South Cambridgeshire. Cambridge will not change in the slightest.

The brief, from Government, was for "minimal change" and that certainly seems to have been the guiding principle in Cambridge. In the rest of Cambridgeshire the changes are;

• two seats in Peterborough (North & South) will include wards of Huntingdonshire and Fenland
• Huntingdon takes in Chatteris
• A "new" seat is formed from St Neots (from Huntingdonshire) and a great chunk (roughly Gamlingay, Cambourne, Hardwick and Bar Hill) of South Cambridgeshire
• The remains of South Cambridgeshire District teams up with Queen Edith's
• The whole of East Cambridgeshire District joins with the 4 wards of Newmarket to become a cross-county seat with Suffolk
• March and Wisbech join Downham Market to form a cross-county seat with Norfolk

What effect these changes will have, if they go through - consultation is scheduled to start soon, I'll leave up to the papers to crunch the numbers and produce the interesting pictures. Given that all other seats in Cambridgeshire were Conservative and the one Liberal seat (Cambridge) is unchanged I predict the only significant piece being the changes to South Cambridgeshire and the new seat.