Old Bexley & Sidcup.

Old Bexley and Sidcup sits on the south-eastern edge of Greater London, a suburban seat built almost entirely around a single contiguous built-up area of roughly 101,000 people taking in Sidcup, Blackfen, Welling and Falconwood. With a median age of 41, a population that is around four-fifths White and just under a third degree-educated, the constituency reads as settled outer-London suburbia rather than inner-city or rural. There is no patchwork of competing towns here; the seat is one town in effect, its wards running into one another. Local services fall to a single authority, the London Borough of Bexley, which administers all seven of the seat's wards.

Bexley has long leaned Conservative, and the ward picture shows little sign of movement. Across the most recent borough contests in May 2026, every ward in the seat returned Conservative councillors, from Sidcup and East Wickham to St Mary's and St James. At Westminster the pattern holds but with a sharper qualifier: the Conservatives took the seat in 2024 on 37.6 per cent, with Labour close behind on 30.1, a margin of barely seven points against the better than forty-point gap recorded in 2019. Louie French, the sitting Conservative who has held the seat since a December 2021 by-election, sits within that narrowed contest rather than above it.

The direction of travel, on the figures available, is a Conservative position that remains intact locally but is plainly less commanding than it once was at the parliamentary level. Recent coverage of the borough has carried a steady, administrative tone, framing the council's continuity in office as routine rather than contested even as smaller challengers register on the margins. Vehicle crime appears to run around a third above the comparable average. Taken together, the seat looks safe at council level and Conservative-held at Westminster, but with a general-election margin tight enough to keep it within the range of the genuinely competitive.