Perth & Kinross-shire.

Perth and Kinross-shire is a Scottish county seat of roughly 101,700 people, built around the city of Perth and reaching out across the smaller towns and farming country of central Perthshire and Kinross-shire. Its median age, 46, sits above the national figure, marking a settled rather than youthful electorate. The seat is anchored by Perth itself, with the surrounding wards -- Almond and Earn, the Carse of Gowrie, Kinross-shire -- thinning into rural and small-town territory rather than a single dominant centre. Local services across all of it are run by one body, Perth and Kinross Council, a Scottish unitary authority, which accounts for seven wards within these boundaries.

The ward picture is mixed rather than settled. Across the most recent contests, fought in 2022, the SNP took the largest share of seats, ahead of the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats, Labour and independents picking up the remainder -- a multi-party patchwork in which no party commands the field. Those results are now some years old and predate the 2024 parliamentary contest. At Westminster, the seat was created on 2023 boundaries and first fought in 2024, when the SNP won on 37.8 per cent, with the Conservatives the runners-up on 29.6 per cent, a margin of around eight points. The sitting member, Pete Wishart, has held a Perth-area seat for the SNP since 2001.

On the figures available the seat reads as competitive rather than secure, an eight-point SNP lead over a Conservative challenger in a council area where neither party dominates the wards. Recent local coverage has had a markedly administrative and development-focused character, dominated by planning decisions, infrastructure work and the long arc of a major expansion masterplan for Perth, rather than by political contest. Taken together, the position is one of a contested county seat whose recent direction-of-travel turns more on land and services than on partisan drama.