Stourbridge.

Stourbridge is a West Midlands seat built around a single dominant town and its smaller neighbours rather than open country. The town of Stourbridge itself houses roughly 55,000 people, close to three-fifths of the constituency, with Brierley Hill adding another fifth and parts of Dudley and Kingswinford making up most of the rest; barely a fiftieth of residents live rural or dispersed. The electorate of about 68,000 is older than the national norm, with a median age of 42, predominantly White at 87 per cent, and modestly educated, with around a quarter holding degrees. One authority runs local services across all seven of the seat's wards: Dudley, a metropolitan borough council.

Local politics here has shifted sharply at ward level. In the May 2026 borough contests, Reform UK took every one of the seat's wards, its winning shares ranging from the low thirties to nearly half, though in the most heavily contested town wards it led on a far thinner plurality. That marks a clear break from the parliamentary picture, which itself moved a long way in 2024: Labour won the seat on 38.5 per cent, ahead of the Conservatives on 30.8, having trailed by thirty points on the old boundary in 2019. Cat Eccles has held the seat for Labour since that election, breaking with her party on one likely-whipped vote in the past quarter.

The direction of travel appears genuinely unsettled. A Labour parliamentary majority of under eight points sits awkwardly beside a clean Reform sweep of the borough wards, and the seat reads as contested rather than secure on the figures available. Recorded crime offers one local strain, with shoplifting running close to half above the comparable average and vehicle crime around a third higher. Recent local reporting has had a civic, locally-focused character -- regeneration aspirations and council business rather than national drama -- which fits a place whose politics is in flux beneath a fairly quiet surface.