Stevenage.

Stevenage is a single-town seat in the south-eastern reaches of Hertfordshire, built around the post-war New Town that gives the constituency its name and houses the overwhelming majority of its roughly 99,900 residents. Stevenage itself accounts for some 88,000 people, close to nine in ten of the seat, with the villages of Knebworth, Codicote and Datchworth and a thin band of dispersed rural settlement making up the remainder. It is a comparatively young and white constituency, with a median age of 38 and just under a third of adults degree-educated. Local services are split across three district authorities -- Stevenage Borough, which covers thirteen of the wards, alongside North Hertfordshire and East Hertfordshire on the fringes.

The recent ward picture has moved sharply. Of the eighteen most-recent ward contests, Reform UK took nine, the Conservatives four, Labour and Co-operative three and the Liberal Democrats two, with Reform topping the poll across much of the urban core in May 2026 on vote shares typically in the high thirties. The outlying Codicote and Aston wards, last contested in 2023 and 2024, stayed Conservative. That municipal turbulence sits against a parliamentary record that still leans Labour: the seat was won for Labour in 2024 on 41.4 per cent, a clear margin over the Conservatives on 25.9, having gone Conservative on the same boundaries in 2019. The sitting member, Kevin Bonavia, has held the seat since 2024 and shows no recent whipped dissent.

On the figures available the seat looks contested rather than settled: a Labour parliamentary majority overlaying ward results that have tilted towards Reform within the space of a single cycle. Recent local coverage has had a markedly electoral and administrative character, dominated by the council contest and by the town's civic calendar, with little to suggest a wider crisis. The combination -- a young New Town that returned a Labour MP comfortably yet handed Reform the largest share of its ward votes -- leaves the seat among the more genuinely in-flux in the region.