600 seats again
On Newsnight yesterday they had a price about what the political impact might be of the reduction in seat numbers to 600, based on a projection by Simon Wilks-Heeg and Stephen Crone. Mark Pack has kindly put Wilks-Heeg and Crone's actual paper up on scribd here.
The paper is based on the electorate from December 2009, rather than the electorate at the General Election in 2010. In actual fact, the boundary review will be based upon the electorate in December 2010, but for obvious reasons those figures don't exist yet. Wilks-Heeg and Crone have worked out the number of seats each country will get, and what that should mean for each region, and then made some educated guesses about how that might pan out in terms of partisan effect. Their estimates are that the Conservatives would lose 13 seats, Labour 25 and the Liberal Democrats 7 - meaning the Conservatives end up gaining 12 seats relative to Labour.
At this stage it is very difficult to make firm predictions about what the partisan effect will be from boundary changes. We don't know the final electorate figures, nor what county boundaries the Boundary Commissions will choose to cross, nor indeed whether there will be any more changes to the proposed legislation as it goes through the Commons (campaigns like OneWight may, for example, manage to get extra exemptions). Even once those things are decided, there will be various different ways that boundaries could pan out. You can work out complex projections of what might happen, as Lewis Baston of the ERS did for Scotland and Wales a few months back, but they can only project one possible solution out of many alternatives. At this stage, Wilks-Heeg and Crone's projections are probably as good as it is worth doing. For what it's worth, my "back of an envelope" calculations are much the same as Wilks-Heeg and Crone's - based on a crude look at where seats are likely to go and what knock on effects might be, I'd expect the Conservatives to lose somewhere around 10 to 12 less than Labour.
