Some thoughts on the boundary review "pause button"

Given a lot of people have asked me the same questions, here are some quick pointers about the legal technicalities of Nick Clegg's statement on the boundary changes.

First, the Boundary Commissions review process continues unaffected. The Boundary Commissions will still report their revised recommendations, probably in October, then final recommendations sometime next year. Once they've delivered their reports to the government the Secretary of State is required to lay a draft order implementing them before Parliament and there will be a vote on whether or not to adopt them.

All of this is set down in legislation and, unless the law is changed, has to happen even if everyone knows the Commons are going to vote them down. Of course, it would be possible to change the law to stop the currently ongoing review, for example, as Lord Rennard has suggested today, by inserting an extra clause in the existing Electoral Administration Bill. In Nick Clegg's statement today, however, he suggested that David Cameron did not wish to do this and wanted to bring the review to a vote.

This could be because Cameron hopes to negotiate further with the Lib Dems on the issue in the next year, or strike deals with minor parties to get the boundaries through... or perhaps he just doesn't want to re-open the can of worms of primary legislation on boundary reviews after the difficult passage of the earlier legislation. It is, however, worth noting that this means the boundary review isn't dead yet - James Forsyth here suggests that Downing Street still has hopes of getting it passed.

Assuming that doesn't happen though, what happens next? Well, the vote next year is only to implement the Boundary Commissions recommendations - it won't affect the changes to the rules or frequency of boundary reviews that last year's legislation introduced. As such the next election will be fought on the existing boundaries, but afterwards the Boundary Commission will once again start a new review, still based on the new rules, still aimed at reducing the Commons to 600 seats... and it will keep on doing so every Parliament unless the law is changed.

If Labour win the next election I would expect them to amend the rules, most likely to move away from reviews every 5 years to reviews every 8-12 years as previously (or possibly, given the noises they made about linking boundary revisions to resident population rather than registered electorate, linking boundary reviews to the ten yearly census).