If the Sunday newspapers are to be believed then residents of Hucclecote in Gloucester could be in for a rude awakening before the year is over.

My constituency of Gloucester has around 90,000 voters registered in it at the moment. The Boundary Commission (which is independent of the government) held a review in 2002 to review Gloucester’s boundaries, because on average constituencies only have around 60,000 voters in them.

So they recommended that the Longlevens ward be removed from the constituency. The Commission is independent, 90,000 is too large and Longlevens has clear boundaries marked out by the Tewkesbury, Estcourt and Cheltenham roads, so I accepted that recommendation.

The Tories opposed the recommendation and instead called for the removal of the Hucclecote ward from Gloucester.

Now, as the Sunday papers reported, David Cameron’s Conservatives have decided that they will pre-empt any future independent Boundary Commission report if they win the next election and will instead force the Commission to tear up existing boundaries to reduce the number of MPs.

Now that may sound plausible to you, but a couple of weeks ago they published an amendment to a Bill which showed us some of the detail of their plans. Gloucester now has 82,000 electors. If the Tories win the election they will immediately redraw boundaries and make every constituency strictly 70,000 electors in size, plus or minus 2 per cent. 

In the event of a close general election result nationally, David Cameron is reported to be considering calling another election in the year 2010 under his new boundaries.

So the historic City of Gloucester, which has been represented by a Member of Parliament at Westminster for over 700 years could be carved up by Cameron’s plan. You would not have any say in this at the ballot box and theoretically you could face an election before the end of this year on radically different boundaries. I think the most likely scenario is that the Tories would wish to lose 12,000 electors by taking out Hucclecote (because they tried that before), although they may go for Quedgeley – perhaps even both.

These details were revealed in the House of Commons in an opposition Amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governancer Bill and in the media by the News of the World.

Parmjit Dhanda MP

Member of Parliament for Gloucester