The Egham Town ward of Runnymede Borough Council appears to have been saved in essentially its present form.

A proposal from Runnymede Council to amputate a large part of the ward (virtually all of the streets to the west of Station Road and south of the High Street) and to merge the cut-off section with the Englefield Green East ward in a new ward called Egham Hill was provisionally largely endorsed in May by the Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE). But in a stunning and very welcome change of mind, the Commission this week comprehensively rejected the plan.

It finally recommended that the Egham Town ward should keep the streets Runnymede Council had wanted to remove and that Vicarage Road (and most of the the streets immediately off it) should be restored to it. It also concluded that the proposed Egham Hill ward should not come into existence, and that the Englefield Green East ward should remain but have its number of councillors reduced from 3 to 2. These decisions are subject to the agreement by the House of Commons to a parliamentary order.

The reversal by the Commission followed a campaign led by the Egham Residents’ Association, Egham’s Independent councillors and the Englefield Green Village Residents’ Association. This resulted in over 100 letters of objection being sent to the LGBCE. ERA asked for the retention of the Egham Town ward in its current form (but with the addition of Vicarage Road), for the quashing of the proposed Egham Hill ward and for the Englefield Green East ward to have only 2 councillors. So the final recommendations from the Commission gave us everything we wanted. We cannot be more pleased, and we wish to thank all our members and supporters who backed us on this issue - which went to the very core of Egham’s identity and what being a resident of Egham means.

We argued that the removal from the Egham Town ward of all the streets Runnymede Council wanted to take away would be an insufferable assault on Egham’s identity and sense of community, and that the Egham Hill ward would be an artificial entity without a soul. The Englefield Green Village Residents’ Association took the same view, and was agreeable to a cut in the number of councillors for Englefield Green East.

Such was the strength of our argument - a reflection of the weakness of Runnymede Council’s case - that the LGBCE was finally persuaded to make a very rare departure from a statutory norm of having 3-councillor wards for councils that elect councillors by thirds in a three-year cycle. So Runnymede Council will be reduced from 42 to 41 councillors, with 13 3-member wards and one 2-member ward (Englefield Green East). The latter ward has a markedly lower electorate than other wards, which is partly a consequence of its being the home ward for Royal Holloway College.

The most relevant section of the final recommendations of the report from the LGBCE and a map of the Egham Town ward, it has now proposed are detailed below:

Egham Town, Englefield Green East and

Englefield Green West

The relevant section of the LGBCE Report is available here