THE Reverend Matthew Simpkins, priest-in-charge at Lexden, in his letter wrote against proposals by the Boundary Commission to remove Lexden from the Colchester Parliamentary constituency (Gazette Letters, July 21, “Lexden should stay in constituency”).

I fully understand his thinking, but the consequence of what he stated would mean that other areas of Colchester rather than Lexden would suffer the fate which he does not wish to happen to his area.

The Boundary Commission has a legal duty to create Parliamentary constituencies which broadly have electorates of a similar size.

The growth of housing in many parts of Essex, not just the Colchester area, means that the commission has had to review the whole of Essex.

It is independent of Government, and seeks to maintain logical community identities where this is possible.

However, such has been the increased population in Colchester it is impossible to keep the whole of urban Colchester intact in a single urban constituency.

The “cake” has to be cut somewhere, and the commission has concluded that the most logical is the two wards of Prettygate and Lexden & Braiswick.

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If not these two wards, which two instead?

Mile End and Highwoods, or Greenstead and St Anne’s & St John’s, or Berechurch and Shrub End?

These areas have as much claim to remain in the Colchester constituency as does Lexden.

I had the privilege of being MP for Colchester for 18 years from 1997 to 2015, with the first of those 13 years also including Stanway, which was taken away in 2010 because of the last Parliamentary boundary review.

There is another scenario which would be even worse than Colchester losing two wards at Parliamentary level (it makes no difference to the local government boundaries of Colchester Borough Council and Essex County Council which remain the same).

This would be for the town to be cut in half – as happened between 1983 and 1997.

What is illogical is the local government ward boundaries introduced in 2016 which resulted in Lexden being split – with some merged with Prettygate and the rest in a ward called “Lexden and Braiswick” (a ward which includes West Bergholt) although Lexden Church and Lexden Primary School are no longer in the ward bearing the name Lexden.

I invite the Reverend Simpkins to join me in seeking to get Lexden reunified. That, I suggest, is of greater importance.

Sir Bob Russell

Colchester