Exmouth & Exeter East.

Exmouth and Exeter East is a Devon coastal-and-suburban seat anchored by the resort town of Exmouth, which holds just over a third of its residents, with the eastern edge of Exeter accounting for a further fifth. Beyond these two centres the seat thins into rural and dispersed country and a string of villages -- Budleigh Salterton, the new settlement of Cranbrook, and Topsham among them. The population is older than the national figure, with a median age of 44, and overwhelmingly White at 96 per cent. Local services are split across two district councils: East Devon, which runs twelve of the wards here, and Exeter, which runs three.

That division of administration is mirrored in a fragmented local politics. Across the most recent ward contests the Liberal Democrats have won most often, with Independents close behind and the Conservatives further back; Labour and the Greens have taken the occasional seat. No single party commands the ground, and recent results point broadly towards a Liberal Democrat and Independent tilt at district level rather than a settled majority. At the parliamentary level the picture is finer still. The seat was new in 2024, and David Reed took it for the Conservatives on 28.7 per cent, ahead of Labour on 28.5 -- a margin of roughly two votes in a thousand.

On the figures available this is one of the more genuinely contested seats in the South West, won on a knife-edge and sitting beneath a district map that leans away from the governing MP's party. Recent local coverage has had a markedly administrative cast, dominated by planning disputes and the friction between district and town tiers over development and civic assets. There is little here to suggest a settled allegiance in either direction. The combination of a wafer-thin Westminster margin and a council picture pulling another way leaves the seat looking unusually open, its direction-of-travel still unfixed.