Community Governance Review

We asked for your feedback for a Community Governance Review (CGR), to ensure arrangements for borough towns and parishes are effective and appropriate.

A CGR is a legal process where we review how people are represented. As well as town and parish councils, reviews also consider electoral arrangements, such as the number of councillors and individual warding arrangements in towns and parishes.

Consultation stages

We invited feedback on existing arrangements during a consultation, which ran from 30 January to 25 April 2025 and received 143 responses, alongside representations from town and parish councils. You can read the responses by scrolling down this page.

We considered those comments and prepared draft recommendations, which were put to the council on 23 July 2025.

Our final recommendations were then shared with residents for feedback in a next round of consultation from 4 August to 13 November 2025. You can also read below for more detail about a CGR, how it works and why we’ve been carrying one out.

Recommendations approved

Changes to town and parish boundaries were agreed at a full meeting of the borough council on 22 January 2026. The approval marked a milestone in our borough-wide Community Governance Review, which began in January 2025.

It was the first such review since 2016, in line with Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) recommendations to typically conduct them every 10-15 years. We consulted extensively in stages with residents and more than 500 people invaluably gave their views.

Boundary changes were subject to final LGBCE approval, which has now been received. The changes aim to:

Reflect residents’ views
Act within the review’s constraints and guidance
Reflect modern communities while supporting effective and convenient local governance
Ensure communities are represented in the parish that best reflects their local identity and day‑to‑day connections

Many new boundaries from the review are set to come into force from April 2027, in time for May 2027 town and parish council elections. Some are set to be introduced in April 2026, ready for elections this May.

View interactive map of 2026 and 2027 boundary changes

After clicking through to the interactive map, click on 'Community Governance Review' in the left-hand menu and one or more of the four options below to view changes.