"Today Parliament agreed to the Prime Minister’s motion to hold a General Election on 8 June 2017. This election will be held on the current Parliamentary boundaries, and will elect 650 MPs across the UK.
The work of the Boundary Commission for England (and of the Commissions for the three other parts of the UK) is set out in the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986 and is not affected directly by the holding of a General Election during a review. We have recently completed the second consultation of the 2018 Boundary Review and will be spending time over the summer analysing the 25,000 public comments that we have received on them. If we decide to revise our proposals, we will publish the revised constituencies and consult on them, probably towards the end of 2017. The Parliamentary Constituencies Act requires us to report our recommendations to Parliament in September 2018 and we are on track to do so.
Should Parliament agree to implement our recommendations, the new boundaries we recommend will be in place at the next General Election after that time. In accordance with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, that election is due to be held in May 2022."
There is no reference here to the fact that the 2022 election would then be taking place on the basis of constituency sizes on December 1st 2014. It is more than possible there would be parliamentary debate on the effect of this, which to some extent would cancel the original legislative aim for parity of electorate sizes across constituencies within a margin of +/- 5%. Population movements over the nearly eight years, especially in urban areas, would probably have required considerable redrawing of boundaries to achieve such an aim. We await the response of the new parliament.
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