Written 12/03/04

The Boundary Committee of the Electoral Commission is recommending an expansion of the County Council with ten new Councillors to represent the community of Cambridgeshire. Residents and interested bodies are being consulted on the proposals and have until 26th April to make their views known.

You can find the documents here on the Boundary Committee web site.

They are two large (1.5MB) PDFs.

The key bits for us areas follows:

135 [...] In the west of the district we are proposing a single-member Waterbeach division comprising the district wards of Milton including Milton (detached) and Waterbeach, and Horningsea parish of The Wilbrahams district ward. [...]

136 We note that our proposed Waterbeach division would constitute a detached division. This is due to an area of Milton district ward being detached (Milton detached) and this was brought to our attention during the recent electoral arrangements review of South Cambridgeshire. During this review it was suggested that Milton detached be combined in a ward with The Wilbrahams. However, this proposal was rejected as it can be argued that a detachment would still occur as the two areas are geographically separated by the River Cam, which forms a significant barrier. The anomaly in this area would be best addressed by an amendment to the external boundary between Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire, as the only access into the Milton Detached area is from Cambridge City. However, this option is outside the remit of this review. Therefore, although it results in a detached division, we consider that the identities and interests of the local community would be better reflected if the two parts of Milton parish are retained within the same division.

137 Under our draft recommendations the district of South Cambridgeshire would have 57% coterminosity between district ward and county division boundaries. [...] Our proposed Fulbourn, Waterbeach, Melbourn, Duxford and Sawston divisions would initially contain 18%, 18%, 12%, 5% and 5% more electors than the county average respectively (9%, 10%, 5% and 1% more and 3% fewer by 2007).

So in essence we believe the proposal is that our division will have Horningsea added to it. This means that we would go from being 3% over represented to being 18% under represented.

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