The Boundary Commissions

Book excerpt: The four Boundary Commissions, one each for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, were established in the mid-1940s and have now been responsible for creating five new maps of Parliamentary constituencies. Despite their importance in British political life, very little has been written about the Commissions and how they work, and much that has been written focuses on the short-term issues of the electoral impact of a new set of constituencies. This volume is a study of the Commissions, involving in-depth interviews with all major interest groups and individuals alongside scrutiny of all relevant documents and statistical analyses of the outcomes.