South Cambridgeshire.

South Cambridgeshire is a rural-scattered seat with no dominating town, wrapping around the southern and western edges of Cambridge itself. Rather more than a fifth of residents live in dispersed countryside and small villages, and a further fifth fall within the part of Cambridge city the boundary draws in; Sawston and the paired settlement of Great Shelford and Stapleford follow, ahead of a long tail of villages such as Linton, Melbourn and Fulbourn. The constituency is comfortably affluent and well educated, with close to half of residents degree-qualified and a median age in the low forties. Local services are split across two district authorities -- South Cambridgeshire, which covers most of the seat, and Cambridge, which runs the handful of inner wards.

That two-council geography sits beneath a politics that has moved firmly in one direction. The Liberal Democrats took 22 of the 25 most-recently contested wards, leaving the Conservatives with two and Labour with one, and they hold the district council with a large majority. The parliamentary picture has tracked the same shift: the seat returned a Conservative in 2019 on 46.3 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats four points behind, before flipping in 2024 to the Liberal Democrats on 46.8 per cent against 27.4 per cent for the Conservatives. Pippa Heylings, the sitting Liberal Democrat member since 2024 and a former district councillor, speaks most often on energy and environmental questions.

On the figures available the seat now looks broadly settled rather than contested, with the Liberal Democrat advantage widening at both council and parliamentary level. Recent local coverage has had a markedly administrative tenor, dominated by council business -- environmental strategy, community facilities and budget support -- rather than political conflict. The Conservatives remain the nominal challengers but appear, for now, some distance back. Barring a wider regional swing, the constituency reads as one in which the recent realignment has consolidated rather than loosened.