Community Governance Reviews

You can’t be on the wrong side of the boundary if the line is thicker than your entire house.

Community Governance Reviews are the method by which town, parish, and community council boundaries are modified in England and Wales. They affect our work because they occasionally result in changes to local authority wards, which we then have to reflect on our services. However, accessing the maps needed to do this for the first election after the change is essentially impossible; consequently, sometimes our services give voters the wrong ward.

What is a Community Governance Review?

Community Governance Reviews (CGRs) were introduced in 2007 as part of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act. The Act devolved significant powers to principal councils (district councils, unitary councils, and London boroughs), allowing them to create and reorganise parishes within their areas without the need for central government involvement. The Act’s goal was to increase the number of parish councils in England, and simplify the process for altering their boundaries so that parishes better reflect the human geography of each area. CGRs were included as a mechanism for ensuring that existing parish boundaries could be modified in response to changes (a new housing development, for example). An English CGR can be triggered by the principal council, or via a petition from electors.

Aside from local authority-wide CGRs, at any one time there will be dozens of small reviews taking place across the country (no UK-wide data is published on this, so we don’t know how many happen). For example, at time of writing Somerset council is conducting three separate CGRs: one relatively large one encompassing the town of Taunton and surrounding area, and two smaller reviews covering two or three parishes each. The changes implemented by CGRs are usually minor in the grand scheme of things, but they can still affect hundreds of properties within the particular parish.

A similar process (known simply as Community Reviews) was introduced for Welsh community councils in 2013, via the Democracy and Boundary Commission Cymru Act.

How CGRs affect our work

Democracy Club runs election lookup services - the voter enters their postcode, and receives information relating to upcoming elections in their area. This service does not at present cover town, parish, or community council elections, so most CGRs are not relevant to our work.

However, occasionally a principal council may request a change to its own ward boundaries following a CGR, because parish and principal council ward boundaries are often coterminous. Whether a CGR results in an alteration to a principal council ward is up to the Local Government Boundary Commission for England or the Democracy and Boundary Commission Cymru. If a change is made, we need to alter our own maps to ensure that the results voters see reflect the most up-to-date boundaries.

The problem

When principal council boundaries are changed as part of a whole-council review, the boundary commissions publish almost all the machine readable data (‘shapefiles’) we need on their own websites. This system is not perfect, because Ordnance Survey (OS) does not publish the changes until after the May elections (leaving us to correct OS’ out-of-date maps using the Boundary Commissions’ files - without the identifiers needed to easily match everything up), but it is straightforward enough for us to follow and work with. Ordnance Survey used to prevent the boundary commissions from publishing any mapping data before their own maps were produced. This is no-longer the case, but OS still refuses to publish election maps itself until after the first election in which the boundaries were used.

Community Governance Reviews are different, however. The most crucial difference is that, unlike principal council reviews where the draft boundaries are published online by the boundary commissions, when a CGR happens the machine-readable shapefiles aren’t usually published prior to the first election in which they are used. Councils aren’t required to publish the maps at all - sometimes the map exists only in physical form in the council offices. In other cases we might get a very low quality PDF, from which it is essentially impossible to derive accurate maps. This means we have to wait until the first Ordnance Survey BoundaryLine update (which is usually published after polling day, or sometimes a few days before).

As a result, the only thing we can really do is run the first election affected by the CGR using the old boundaries, and then correct them afterwards once Ordnance Survey has published its update. This means we sometimes know we’re serving people the wrong results, but we aren’t able to fix the issue.

Less seriously, CGRs are harder to keep track of. We follow all boundary changes by scraping legislation.gov.uk RSS feeds for new legislation containing “electoral changes” in the title, but unlike full reviews conducted by the boundary commissions, there’s no single place we can look at for CGRs. Indeed, in the process of writing this blog, we discovered a CGR we’d missed back in 2022. Sometimes Ordnance Survey itself doesn’t know about CGRs immediately, because it relies on the councils themselves reporting any new changes. It’s all a bit of a mess.

What would better look like

In an ideal world, all the new boundaries relevant to upcoming elections would be published by Ordnance Survey or some other part of government (with GSS codes, please!) well before the first elections to use them. There would also be a more reliable method for CGRs to be announced and tracked centrally, so everyone has plenty of notice (if this happened, we’d also be able to tell voters about a CGR while they still have time to respond to any ongoing consultation).

Failing this, we think there should be a legal requirement either for councils or the boundary commissions to publish draft machine-readable maps (shapefiles) whenever a CGR is completed, so that boundary changes due to CGRs are at least on a par with other reviews. Then we’d be able to tell people about them.

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