PLANS to redraw MPs' boundaries have come under fire from Worcestershire County Council's opposition leader - who has called it "barmy".

Labour group leader Cllr Peter McDonald wants County Hall to voice an objection to the big shake-up before it is too late.

As the Worcester News revealed in September, all six parliamentary seats in Worcestershire are due to be redrawn under a Boundary Commission plan to reduce the number of MPs and produce similar voter numbers in each one.

It means giving Worcester areas like Whittington, Norton and Drakes Broughton, lumping Malvern Hills with parts of Herefordshire and replacing Mid-Worcestershire with a new seat covering Evesham, Pershore and Stratford-upon-Avon.

But Cllr McDonald says the alterations will make MPs' workloads worse, confuse voters and muddle the waters between council boundaries and parliamentary areas.

He said: "We've got to get the Government to stop this nonsense right in its tracks before it goes further, it's crazy.

"It's a very bad idea because it will replace our traditional boundaries with ridiculous seats where MPs are dealing with at least two council leaders, or even three.

"The whole thing is barmy, if they want to reduce costs they should be looking at the House of Lords.

"MPs already look after a lot of people, if we give them even more the quality of what they are able to do will suffer - once these boundaries are gone we won't get them back."

The Boundary Commission is independent of the Government and has been tasked with deleting 50 seats by the 2020 general election, so the Commons is left with 600 MPs.

It is also being asked to equal out the significant current size disparities so each constituency has as close to 75,000 voters as possible.

At the moment they run from 21,769 electors to 108,804, a big difference which led to the Conservative Party pledging to equal it out in its manifesto.

Some county MPs, like Worcester's Robin Walker, has called the changes "pretty uncontroversial" and has pointed to his city seat largely returning back to what it was before 1992 anyway.

Others like Nigel Huddleston and Harriett Baldwin are known to be uneasy about some aspects of the proposals, but are supportive of the principle of cutting the cost of politics.

A consultation over it is currently ongoing and will run until Monday, December 5.

Cllr Simon Geraghty, the county council's leader, is due to be questioned on it by Labour at a full council meeting next Thursday.