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There is a legal requirement for electoral boundaries to be reviewed from time to time
so that that the numbers of electors represented by each councillor in a local authority remain roughly equal.
The St Helens electoral wards are being reviewed at present and the Boundary Committee for England has issued draft recommendations after considering
submissions from a number of local bodies. In the proposals all wards have been modified
in an attempt to keep the electorate of each within 10% of the average for the Borough as a whole,
as the law recommends. Mostly, the Committee has accepted the recommendations of St Helens MBC,
who proposed a reduction in the number of councillors from 54 to 48, with three councillors for each of
16 wards. To balance out the electorate among the 16, inevitably, boundaries had to be re-drawn, moving
blocks of electors from one ward to another and sometimes creating new or renamed wards. Rainhill's complaint is that this process has been carried out
in a manner that shows little sympathy for
our community. Most residents will now be aware that the new ward boundary will follow Warrington Road from the Bridge to the motorway,
consigning those to the north of the road into the Bold ward. Also hived off will be the High School,
St Bartholomew's church and school and the recreation club. Councillors elected to St Helens Borough council by people in this part of Rainhill will represent the Bold ward.
The Parish Council's fear is that once the ward boundaries
have been set, the Parish boundary will be adjusted to match . The community will thus be divided in two,
so that electors from the split-off area, while using the Village's facilities, will have no say
in their running or financing. There has been much confusion in the minds of some residents, who have worried that
school entry will suffer or road repair will differ between opposite sides of the road; some have even thought that the post code would change. These issues
will not arise but, to most people, splitting the community along an arbitrary line through its centre makes no sense.
One of the three statutory criteria that the reviewers must keep in mind is the need to
"reflect the identities and interests of local communities". While the Boundary Committee recognises that it was a hard decision
to split Rainhill, they do little to mollify residents here by their treatment of Rainford, which they regard as a separate and distinct community. |