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Community Governance Reviews

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chris48s edited this page Mar 24, 2020 · 1 revision

Full electoral reviews carried out by LGBCE have two nice properties:

  • They're all carried out by one body, so we can scrape one website and be confident we're in the loop on all of them. We not only know about reviews that have already happened, but we know which ones are in progress/pending.
  • LGBCE pre-publish their final recommendations, which means we can import the new boundaries ahead of the first election to use them.

While the process is a bit fiddly, this does at least mean we have a well-defined process for handling them in a timely fashion:

Community Governance Reviews are more difficult. This is a process which allows local authorities to make minor "technical" boundary changes at a local level (generally alongside review of Parish council arrangements). They are more limited in scope though. For example, a Community Gov Review can't change the number of wards in an authority or the number of councillors that represent a ward. Authorities conduct the reviews themselves rather than handing it over to LGBCE, although LGBCE do issue guidance on how they should be conducted. This creates two problems for us:

  • Discovery: There isn't a single place we can scrape to find out about them all
  • Data: The boundaries aren't pre-published so we usually can't get hold of the updated boundaries until after polling day for the first election that uses them.

Discovery

At the moment, we've got 2 strategies for trying to find out about Community Governance Reviews:

  • legislation.gov.uk RSS feeds: The #electoral_changes channel in Slack is subscribed to some RSS feeds which are hopefully catching most of these after they happen, but we're not 100% confident our search terms are water-tight. Also, this only tells us about Community Governance Reviews that have happened - it doesn't tell us anything about reviews that are scheduled or in progress.
  • volunteers: There are a number of volunteers in our community who are also interested in keeping on top of these changes who helpfully let us know about changes they are aware of.

Data

Usually we don't have a source for the boundary polygons before the first election to use the new boundaries. We don't get them until the May BoundaryLine release. This means we have to knowingly use the old shapes for the first election after the change order then update the divisions for use in future elections.

Process

So far the process for this is fairly ad-hoc, but the steps we followed last time are described in https://github.com/DemocracyClub/EveryElection/issues/570 . There is potential to clarify this process or improve it with tooling.

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