New Constituency Boundaries

As promised many months ago, I have produced an updated estimate of the effect the new constituency boundary changes will have on the political make up of the country. As most readers will know, every 12 to 14 years the counstituency boundaries on which MPs are elected are updated to take account of changes in the population. The latest changes for England and Wales have just been completed and, baring legal challenges, will be in place in time for the next election.

The main effect will be to make the boundaries more favourable to the Conservative party. If the 2005 election had been fought on the new boundaries the Conservatives would have won 214 seats, rather than the 197 they actually won, and Labour would have had a majority of 36, rather than 64. It also slightly reduces the swing the Conservatives need to get an overall majority - down from 7.4% to 7.1%.

Since the last version of my notional results I have corrected some errors than people pointed out to me, and have factored in some feedback from people with local knowledge of how particular wards voted at a Parliamentary level.

The updated figures are available at UKPolling Report's new Election Guide. This includes notional results for every seat in Great Britain, lists of target seats for each of the three main parties and lits of candidates selected so far. Apart from any blindingly obvious errors, I will not be updating the figures again - it will probably not be long until Ralling and Thrasher's "official" figures are out anyway. However, every seat has a separate page for comments allowing you to add feedback if you think the seat will end up voting differently from how the notional figures suggest or just ot comment on the politics of the seat in general and what you think the result will be at the next election. Obviously the chances are that the next election will not be for several years, but hopefully putting up the guide now will let it build into a more useful resource by the time the election does come around.

There are still a few errors in the guide pages (I had to put Wyre Forest into the target lists by hand so some of the "target numbers" are still skew-iff, and there is one Welsh seat that claims to have two Plaid Cymru candidates and no Lib Dems), but they should be ironed out in the next few days.

UPDATE: Comments are now working properly as well!