Boundary review breaks vital link with local communities

AS an active member of the Conservative Party in Yorkshire and the North West for many years, and a former Parliamentary candidate, I have taken a close interest in the proposals to redraw constituency boundaries (Yorkshire Post, September 13).

I was very pleased that this Government included proposals for reducing the number of MPs and gave us the opportunity to be consulted. Having had some experience of previous local changes I fully expected the Commission to miss the opportunity provided, and now they have been published it is obvious that they were only interested in a solution that met the “numbers game”.

I had followed closely the Boundary Commission’s remit, the debates in Parliament, especially those in the House of Lords where peers from all sides showed a wealth of local knowledge in the debates. I could find no rules that would have prevented changes across the boundaries of the counties set up in 1974 and so would have hoped to see some proposals that would have brought back into Yorkshire some of the areas then lost to Lancashire, Co Durham and Teesside.

For example, the proposals for Skipton and Ripon now add to the existing Craven and Harrogate areas six wards in Wensleydale, approximately only 6,000 voters to take it over the 73,000 criteria by some 4,000.

These isolated areas have very little “community linkages” with Craven and it could have been much better to add in areas from Pendle or Ribble Valley parts of historic Yorkshire.

Similar cases could be made for Cleveland, Middlesbrough, Richmond and Thirsk

On my home ground in Calderdale, the proposals could have allowed for one or two wards to be split to leave us with two constituencies within the borough, but instead they have proposed adding Worth Valley (Haworth) from Keighley and Ilkley into Calder Valley with no links of local issues other than a lot of moorland for ramblers and sheep. I hope all our political parties can find ways of opposing these proposals during the consultation period to make sure they are revised to provide us with the opportunity to elect MPs who can work closely with local communities.