Bath.

Bath is an urban seat dominated by a single city. The Census records around 105,610 residents, a comparatively young median age of 36 and an unusually highly qualified population, with roughly 45 per cent degree-educated. The city of Bath accounts for nearly 95,000 people, some 93 per cent of the constituency, leaving the villages of Batheaston, Bathampton and a thin scatter of rural settlements as a small fringe. One authority runs local services across the whole seat: Bath and North East Somerset, a unitary council, which administers all sixteen wards that fall within the constituency.

Local politics here leans firmly towards the Liberal Democrats. Across the twenty-nine most recent ward contests the party took twenty-five, with the Greens and independents picking up two apiece, and the Greens notably holding Lambridge. Ward shares have tended to sit comfortably above 40 per cent in the seats the Liberal Democrats won, suggesting a settled rather than marginal local picture. The parliamentary pattern points the same way. The Liberal Democrats won the seat in 2024 on 41.3 per cent, well clear of Labour as runner-up on 18 per cent, having previously polled above half the vote in 2019. Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat who has held Bath since 2017, sits within that local current rather than against it.

The seat appears broadly stable, with no obvious challenger to the Liberal Democrat position on the figures available. Recent local coverage has carried a markedly administrative tone, weighted towards transport works, river and green-space schemes and the practicalities of managing a heritage city, rather than political contest. On crime, shoplifting appears to run around 94 per cent above the constituency average and public order offences some 70 per cent above it, patterns consistent with a busy tourist and retail centre. Taken together, the constituency reads as a comfortably held Liberal Democrat seat whose live questions are local and managerial rather than electoral.