Basildon & Billericay.

Basildon and Billericay is an urban Essex seat of roughly 111,000 people, built around two unequal towns. Basildon, a postwar new town of some 69,000, holds close to two-thirds of the constituency; Billericay, an older market town of about 34,000, accounts for most of the rest, with the villages of Crays Hill, Noak Hill and a thin rural fringe making up the remainder. The population is younger than the national figure, with a median age of 38, and predominantly White at 87 per cent. A single authority, Basildon Borough Council, runs local services across the nine wards that fall within the seat, making this a one-council constituency despite its split-town character.

The local political picture has fragmented. Across the nine most recent ward contests, held in May 2026, Reform UK took six and the Conservatives three, with the Conservative wins concentrated in the Billericay and Burstead end and Reform advancing across the Basildon wards of Fryerns, Laindon Park, Pitsea and beyond. Turnouts ran markedly higher in the Billericay contests than in the Basildon ones. At Westminster the seat tells a different story: in 2024 the Conservatives held on by the narrowest possible measure, finishing level with Labour on 30.6 per cent, a collapse from the two-thirds vote share recorded in 2019. The sitting member, Richard Holden, has held the seat since that contest.

On the figures available the seat now reads as genuinely contested rather than settled in any one direction, its parliamentary near-tie sitting awkwardly alongside a council that no party controls. Recent local coverage has had a contested, administrative tenor, dominated by questions of council composition, large-scale housing and the wider reorganisation of Essex local government. Among recorded crime, drugs offences appear to run about 69 per cent above the constituency average, with vehicle crime and violence and sexual offences also elevated. Taken together, the seat appears in flux: durable Conservative votes in the older town, a rising Reform vote across the new town, and a Westminster margin too fine to draw firm conclusions from.