Penistone & Stocksbridge.

Penistone and Stocksbridge is a seat of small towns rather than a single centre, set where the western edge of the South Yorkshire conurbation meets open country. Its largest built-up area is Chapeltown and High Green, with around 22,500 residents, followed by the market town of Penistone, then Ecclesfield and Grenoside and the former steel town of Stocksbridge, with a tenth of the population rural and dispersed. The character is older than the national mean, with a median age of 47. Local services are split between two metropolitan borough authorities, Barnsley and Sheffield, three wards each, so the seat straddles a council boundary as much as a geographic line.

That division shows in a fragmented ward picture. Across the ten most recent ward contests the spoils have been shared almost evenly between the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and Labour, with no party in clear command. The parliamentary contest is tidier: Labour took the seat in 2024 on 43.6 per cent, well ahead of the Conservatives on 23.7, reversing 2019, when the Conservatives won on nearly 48 per cent. The sitting member, Marie Tidball, has held it for Labour since, with no whipped dissent in recent months.

On the figures available the seat looks contested rather than settled, a decisive general-election margin for Labour sitting above local results in which three parties trade wards. Recent local reporting has had a low-profile, community-administrative character, with little to mark the constituency out nationally. A Westminster lead resting on a splintered local base across two councils leaves the seat best read as in flux.