Chesham & Amersham.

Chesham and Amersham is a prosperous, well-educated swathe of southern Buckinghamshire, a network of Chiltern small towns rather than a place built around any single centre. Chesham and Amersham anchor the seat, with roughly 21,600 and 16,600 residents, followed closely by Hazlemere and Chalfont St Peter and a scatter of smaller towns and villages. Nearly half the population holds a degree and the median age is 44. Local services across all ten of its wards are run by Buckinghamshire Council, the unitary authority that absorbed the old districts.

The parliamentary and local pictures point in different directions. At the 2024 general election the Liberal Democrats took the seat on 44.9 per cent, some ten points clear of the Conservatives, completing a swing that began with the 2021 by-election; in 2019 the Conservatives had held it comfortably on 55.4 per cent. Yet the most recent ward contests, in Hazlemere and Denham, have gone to the Conservatives, suggesting the older loyalties have not dissolved at the local tier. Sarah Green, the Liberal Democrat elected in 2021, sits as one feature of this divided landscape, her recent parliamentary focus tending towards social care, health and local government.

The seat therefore reads as genuinely contested rather than settled, with a Liberal Democrat hold at Westminster running alongside continued Conservative success in the wards. Recent local coverage has had a planning-and-services character, dominated by pressure on Green Belt land and the future of the towns' high streets rather than by national controversy. On the figures available, the direction of travel is one of flux: the parliamentary realignment of recent years has yet to fully reach the council benches, and the gap between how the area votes nationally and locally remains the seat's defining feature.