Skipton & Ripon.

Skipton and Ripon is a large, predominantly rural seat in the western Yorkshire Dales, where dispersed countryside and small villages account for roughly a third of the population and outweigh any single centre. Its two principal towns, Ripon and Skipton, are close in size at around 16,600 and 15,400 residents, trailed by smaller villages such as Cross Hills, Sutton-in-Craven and Settle. The seat is older than the national norm, with a median age of 50 and an above-average share of degree-educated residents. Local services across all fourteen wards are run by North Yorkshire, the unitary authority created in 2023.

Ward contests here have produced a fragmented map rather than a clear majority. Across the fourteen most recent results the Conservatives lead with five, but independents, Liberal Democrats and Greens between them hold the remaining nine. Most of these contests date from 2022, so the picture is some years old and should be read with caution. At Westminster the seat stayed Conservative in 2024, but only narrowly: Julian Smith, the MP since 2010, held on with around 35 per cent against Labour's 32, far tighter than his commanding lead of 2019.

On the figures available the seat looks more contested than its long Conservative tenure suggests, the parliamentary margin having narrowed sharply and the local map split four ways. Recent local coverage has had a broadly administrative tenor, centred on town regeneration, housing delivery and routine council business rather than national controversy, and the seat has kept a low profile in recent months. Taken together it reads as a constituency in flux: still Conservative on paper, but with its former dominance no longer evident at either tier.