CHAPTER 6 Boundaries and electoral system for regional assemblies

REGIONAL ASSEMBLY BOUNDARIES

6.1 The Government proposes that the boundaries of elected regional assemblies should be as shown in the box on page 8. These are now the most widely accepted and used regional boundaries.

6.2 These regions:

• are the standard statistical regions used by the Office of National Statistics, and are used as the administrative boundaries by the Government Offices for the regions, Regional Development Agencies, and a number of other parts of central government. The Government believes that they should be used wherever possible by central government bodies that have a regional organisation. Where such bodies currently use different regional boundaries, the Government has a strong presumption in favour of moving to these boundaries when the organisation is next reviewed (see the Modernising Government White Paper, from 1999). They also form the constituencies for elections to the European Parliament, and the 2001 White Paper on House of Lords reform proposed that they should form the constituencies for which regional members of the reformed House might be elected;
• are a credible size to support a regional assembly. Although regions differ greatly in size in some other countries (for example, in Germany, Spain and Italy), regions significantly smaller than the Government Office regions would raise major questions about the distinction between regional and local government. On the other hand, regions based on these boundaries are large enough to take a strategic view between the national and local levels and to add real value without undermining the role of local government;
• have a reasonably high level of public recognition. For example, a survey carried out for The Economist in 1999 found that in six out of the eight Government Office regions outside London over three-quarters of respondents could name the administrative region in which they lived. Only in Yorkshire and the Humber (66 per cent) and the East of England (52 per cent) was the figure below this level. These levels of recognition are high bearing in mind that the organisations currently based on these regions are not ones that most people will encounter in their daily lives, and that no particular effort has been made to publicise their boundaries. Annex A contains more detailed information about each region;
• are increasingly being used by private sector bodies in order to provide better co-ordination with public sector partners. With only minor variations or amalgamations in a few cases, the Confederation of British Industry, chambers of commerce, Trades Union Congress, Friends of the Earth and Council for the Protection of Rural England, as well as many voluntary sector organisations, have based their regional structures on the

Government Office boundaries.

6.3 It could be argued that there is an important difference between public recognition of a region and public acceptance or allegiance. The Government accepts this distinction, which is one reason why our policy is to establish regional assemblies only where there has been a positive vote for one in a referendum. But in terms of deciding the boundaries of the regions within which people will be able to vote, international evidence indicates that it is not necessary for a region to have a strong historic identity in order to create a modern political one. There are examples of regions created administratively in recent times which have developed and maintained a coherent identity and strategic framework – such as the French region of Rhône-Alpes and many of the German Länder.

6.4 More generally, the Government believes that a prolonged debate over the composition of individual regions is likely to generate a good deal of fervour, but with no obvious prospect that boundaries that are more widely acceptable or practicable would emerge at the end. So our current view is that the existing standard regional boundaries are the right ones.

6.5 The Government has not completely ruled out in the longer term the possibility of adopting boundaries for regional assemblies that do not follow the existing boundaries. For instance, a future government may, at some stage, want to change Government Office or Regional Development Agency boundaries for reasons not directly connected to elected regional assemblies. In those circumstances, it would clearly be necessary to keep actual or prospective regional assembly boundaries in line. We therefore intend to build on the existing mechanism for changing Regional Development Agency boundaries, so that in exceptional circumstances in the longer term regional assembly boundaries could be altered. In the short to medium term, we do not plan any changes.

6.6 Whatever the regional boundaries, the Government believes that regional assemblies should:

• work for their region as a whole, not just the dominant urban centres;
• take full account of their sub-regions and organise their activities sub-regionally when necessary or desirable (such as participating in relevant sub-regional partnerships);
• develop and maintain existing crossboundary relationships where these add value. The establishment of regional assemblies is entirely compatible with the continuation of local authority co-operation across regional boundaries.

LOCATION OF AN ELECTED ASSEMBLY WITHIN A REGION

6.7 It will be for an assembly to decide on the best way to meet its accommodation requirements, including the location of its headquarters and whether some of its proceedings should take place at different venues across the region. However, an interim solution will be needed to ensure that an assembly can be up and running from the outset. The Government will therefore ensure that suitable accommodation is available initially. In doing so, we will consult the existing chamber in the region concerned to hear its views on the preferred location and will also take account of any suitable buildings in the region which might have spare capacity. Provided that it represents value for money, any initial accommodation will probably be subject to a short-term lease, so that an assembly can make its own decision.

THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM FOR REGIONAL ASSEMBLIES

6.8 The voting system for regional assembly elections must:

• promote inclusiveness, so that assemblies reflect the interests of the range of communities across all parts of their region; • strike a balance between ensuring that voters have an identifiable constituency representative and encouraging assembly members to take a region-wide view of their responsibilities.

6.9 The Government believes that these two objectives would be best achieved using some form of proportional representation (PR):

• PR provides an assembly membership whose balance more closely reflects the share of votes cast. Voting patterns in England are such that in many – perhaps even most – regions a first-past-the-post system would lead to single-party dominance, with little realistic prospect of changes of control. Based on previous general election results, probably only an assembly in the South West would not give a single party a very clear working majority of members;
• in some regions – such as the North East – the largest party would generally be so dominant under a first-past-the-post system that, simply to give the other parties enough members to have a chance of constituting an effective opposition, the size of an assembly would need to be far larger than the Government believes is necessary or desirable;
• it encourages assembly members to take a region-wide view by avoiding representation in the assembly being linked to relatively small constituencies. It also means that regional assembly constituencies will not mirror parliamentary or local government constituencies and will thus avoid potential tensions;
• PR can facilitate diversity in the selection of candidates by political parties. For instance, some forms of PR include candidate lists which parties could use to achieve a better balance in the selection of their candidates across the region.

6.10 The Government’s preference for some form of PR for regional assembly elections does not mean that PR is necessarily the right model for parliamentary or local government elections, both of which currently use first-past-the-post.

The Additional Member System

6.11 The Government proposes to adopt the Additional Member System (AMS) for regional assembly elections. This system is already used for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Greater London Assembly. It means that a regional assembly will have a majority of members representing individual constituencies and elected by the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, with a minority being elected from regional lists to ensure that the overall representation in an assembly is broadly representative of the votes cast. Each voter would have two votes: one for a constituency member and one for the ‘top-up’ regional list. The system is described in detail in annex G.

6.12 AMS has a number of advantages:

• it ensures that all voters have an identifiable constituency representative, and that counties and sub-regions which have a distinct identity within their region can elect at least one constituency member to represent their interests
• but at the same time the relatively large constituencies and top-up members should avoid tensions between assembly members and MPs representing the same constituencies and encourage assemblies to take a region-wide view of their responsibilities;
• it gives voters a wider choice than most forms of PR, so that, for example, they can vote for a popular independent candidate in their constituency whilst still supporting their preferred party with their top-up vote;
• it is relatively simple to understand.

6.13 AMS is a flexible electoral system and there are a number of details which can make an important difference to how it works in practice. The Government proposes that:

• the proportion of top-up seats in any region will be around 33 to 35 per cent of all seats in the assembly. This is similar to the top-up proportion for the National Assembly for Wales, which is one-third of all seats. The Government intends to ask the Electoral Commission to advise on the boundaries of constituencies within regions which vote for an elected assembly. Until the exact number of seats in any assembly is known (see chapter 7), it is not possible to specify an exact percentage of top-up members for regional assemblies;
• constituencies will be based on existing local authority areas. In most cases, constituencies would comprise one or more unitary or district council areas, but for some of the largest local authorities, there would be two or (exceptionally) three constituencies;
• on grounds of simplicity and to produce the most proportional outcomes, there will be a single top-up constituency in each region, as in London;
• the top-up mechanism will have a minimum threshold for party representation in an assembly of five per cent of the vote, following the GLA precedent.

Other electoral matters

6.14 On other matters, the Government generally proposes to follow the precedent of elections to the GLA, including the holding of assembly elections every four years and qualification and disqualification provisions for people seeking election to, and being members of, a regional assembly. As with the GLA, there will be no bar on MPs, MEPs, councillors or peers standing for election to regional assemblies. Successful candidates will wish to consider whether they should resign from other positions to which they had been elected, but whether they should do so would be a matter for them and their party.

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