London is reviewing its local government ward boundaries. Lewisham is included; here are my notes.

This article was originally written in August 2019; the Boundaries Commission published their recommendations in summary on the 16th December, and in more detail with explanation for each of their decisions. This is their home page for the Lewisham Review.  On first review, they propose,

  1. One new (net) Councillor in Deptfor & New Cross. They have made one new ward, the result of which is that Deptford gets two new Councillors north of the A2.
  2. Lewisham Central, Bellingham and the old New Cross wards are to e shrunk to two councillors.
  3. I need to examine the southern boundary of the Lewisham Deptford CLP i.e. Crofton Park, Ladywell and Lewisham Central.
  4. Parts of Lewisham Deptford are now represented by the Hither Green ward. (This impacts any count as to how many councillors represent each constituency; I originally calculated that Deptford needed another three.)
  5. Unsurprisingly the LGBCE have evened out the number of voters/councillor from Lewisham Council’s proposals although there are variances of between ±9% of voters from the mean.

I have amended the spreadsheet to describe the ward sizes and their variations. Lewisham-Ward-Redistricting (1). This is based on the sheet attached below.

Here’s a map!


Here are my original notes from August.

Most importantly, the Boundaries Commission are not reducing the number of councillors and so will not need to introduce asymmetrically sized wards. i.e. some with two councillors and some with three. I strongly support the council of this size, the numeric relationship between the cabinet and scrutiny and a critical size to provide decent effort in the committees is important.

The Council has a proposal which it maybe taking comments on but will submit by early December.

Here are some more links

  1. The Electoral Commission’s Consultation Page is here, boy, do they have a shit anchor text policy.
  2. Here is Lewisham’s page on the redistricting exercise.
  3. The OS do a political maps tool.
  4. I have been shown this spreadsheet, which comes from the Council and which describes their proposed new wards by polling district.

Here are two maps;

Old with polling districts vs. proposed new

My Highlights

  1. Whitefoot in ‘East disappears in three or four directions
  2. The north of the borough, is mucked around with a lot; NX is split taking some of Evelyn and giving it’s eastern polling districts to a truncated Brockley. Ladywell and Lewisham Central are also split up.
  3. Telegraph Hill is unchanged, and Crofton Park gains one polling district.
  4. The New Brockley and Crofton are significantly larger than average, Grove Park is significantly smaller than average. (By significant, I mean the raw deviation from average is greater than 1000, and several std deviations from the mean.) Six of Deptford’s wards are to be above average size.
  5. Catford South and its contiguous wards are reconfigured, with a new ward coming out it.
  6. Deptford Wards are about 2½ thousand bigger than East and 2¼ thousand bigger than West.
  7. The LWAP wards are generally left alone. (Maybe we should be building more there.)

Here is a spreadsheet, Lewisham Ward Redistricting

it includes the polling district tables used by the council, plus some analysis conducted by me.

There seems to be a trilema, you can’t have constituency boundaries and three councillor wards and equal ward sizes. This solution compromises on equal ward sizes and Constituency Boundaries.

There seems to be an independent body for the local government reviews, the Local Government Boundary Commission for England. Here is their invitation for evidence.

Dave Politics , ,

7 Replies

  1. I went to the meeting which was convened by the LGBCE who explained their consultation and decision process. They have no plans, they are asking for views. The plans in the 1st version of this wiki are those of the council, which is 100% Labour. The Labour Group’s consultation with the Labour Parties would seem to have been poor, but it may be down to each Party’s and the LCF’s poor internal communication. It seems that Ladywell Labour were informed by their Councillors.

  2. The spreadsheet has a ‘tab’ that shows the projected size of the wards if there is no change. Ladywell, because there has been no building there, has little growth projected, in fact there maybe shrinkage and would be only 9,000 voters, 2,500 under the average.

  3. This page was updated to include a first analysis of the LGBCE’s draft proposals, it includes a map from their report and documents the change of councillors representing Deptford. It includes links to their site and report.

    I hve asked for Appendix A in soft copy form.

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