District Electoral Areas Commissioner (Northern Ireland) (Amendment) Order 2006

Chickens sometimes come home to roost quicker than you think. I take personal ministerial responsibility for the decision to reduce the 26 councils to seven, along with my ministerial colleagues. We had a very good and long debate on that issue on two occasions in Grand Committee, when the order went through setting up the boundary commissioner. I cannot go down that road today, although I take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney. I originally thought he was saying that there would be only 50 councillors in Northern Ireland. There are 582 at present. There is a degree of latitude for the boundary commissioner. In other words, we did not fix the maximum for each council at a precise number but provided a degree of latitude. I fully accept that there will be fewer councillors than there are now and their electoral area will be slightly—not massively—larger. There is a degree of flexibility as to the number of councillors per local authority; they will not all necessarily be exactly the same. The Local Government Boundaries Commissioner’s final report is due to be presented on 31 May this year. Parliament has appointed the commissioner to do this job professionally. We do not seek to interfere and I do not want to second-guess the report. A series of public meetings will be held in each of the seven new districts in January and February to allow interested parties to make oral representations on the provisional recommendations which were published in November last year. The final hearing is expected to close on 9 February. The commission’s procedures require it to take into consideration any representations, and it may subsequently revise its provisional recommendations and publish a final recommendation. The grouping of wards is an operational matter for the district electoral commissioner. At the moment it is necessary for local government elections to take place in the timescale that will allow new authorities to operate in a shadow form for a period before taking over responsibility on 1 April 2009. It is the intention to have the elections some time before April 2009 so that the shadow authority can take some pretty important decisions about its headquarters, the chief executive and such before the functions are fully transferred.