Election boundaries

The London Borough of Enfield is required to sub-divide its area into polling districts for the purposes of parliamentary elections and to designate polling places for each of those districts.  In doing so, the authority must seek to ensure that all electors have reasonable facilities for voting as are practicable in the circumstances and have regard to the needs of electors who are disabled.

In order to satisfy the requirements of the Representation of the People Act 1983, the authority is required to complete a full statutory review of all polling districts and polling places as a minimum every four years.  The last statutory review was undertaken in 2011 and came into effect on 1 December 2011.

The documents published as part of that review are available to view and download by clicking here.

Definitions

The following definitions may be of help:

• a polling district is a geographical sub-division of an electoral area, e.g. a parliamentary constituency;
• a polling place is a geographical area in which a polling station is located.  However, as there is no legal definition of what a polling place is, the geographical area can be defined as tightly as a particular building or as widely as the entire polling district;
• a polling station is the actual area where the process of voting takes place, and must be located within the polling place designated for the particular polling district.

For information, Council agreed at its meeting on 9 November 2011 that:

• each polling district and the polling districts bordering it be designated as the polling place for that polling district;
• on an annual basis, the Returning Officer be required to submit a schedule of proposed buildings to be used as polling stations for approval by the Electoral Review Panel;
• any amendments deemed necessary by the Returning Officer to that schedule in the intervening period be notified to the Chairman of the Panel and the Opposition Lead Member with the Returning Officer's reasons for the change.