East Worthing & Shoreham.

East Worthing and Shoreham is a South East coastal seat strung along the West Sussex shore, home to around 96,700 people with a median age of 44 and a population that is overwhelmingly White at roughly nine in ten. No single town dominates: the eastern flank of Worthing accounts for about a third of the seat, with Lancing and Sompting, Shoreham-by-Sea and Southwick forming a near-continuous run of small coastal towns behind it. That settlement pattern is reflected in its governance, which is split between two district authorities. Adur District Council runs the larger share, covering fourteen of the seat's wards, while Worthing Borough Council administers the four wards at its western edge.

That two-council split shapes a notably fragmented local picture. Across the eighteen most recent ward contests, held in May 2026, Reform UK took the largest tally at seven, with the Greens and Labour on four apiece and a scattering of independents besides. No party emerges with a clear grip, and turnouts varied widely between wards. The parliamentary picture is steadier on the figures available. Labour won the seat in 2024 on about 45 per cent, some nineteen points clear of the Conservatives, reversing a comfortable Conservative win in 2019. The sitting MP, Tom Rutland, has held the seat for Labour since that contest and has shown no whipped dissent in recent months.

Taken together, the seat reads as recently won but not settled, with a fragmenting ward map sitting beneath a sizeable parliamentary margin. Recent local coverage has had a largely administrative tenor, weighted toward council budgets, town-centre and seafront regeneration and coastal defence rather than controversy. The contrast between a Labour seat at Westminster and a council map now divided several ways leaves the longer direction-of-travel harder to read than the 2024 result alone would suggest.