Wells & Mendip Hills.

Wells and Mendip Hills is a rural-scattered seat in the South West, where dispersed countryside accounts for the largest share of residents, ahead of a string of small towns. Wells, the cathedral city, is the largest of those at around 11,000 people, followed closely by Shepton Mallet and Yatton, with Cheddar and a chain of Mendip villages filling out the rest. With a median age of 49 and a population that is overwhelmingly White, the constituency reads as older and less urban than the national average. Local services are split across two unitary authorities -- Somerset, which runs nine of the seat's wards, and North Somerset, which runs the remaining four -- so this is a place governed from two town halls rather than one.

That two-council patchwork has been trending one way in recent ward contests. The Liberal Democrats have taken thirteen of the twenty-two most recent ward results, with the Conservatives on five, the Greens on three and a single Independent, and several of those Liberal Democrat wins came on comfortable shares. The Greens have held pockets of their own, notably around Congresbury and Banwell, which complicates any simple read of a uniform swing. At Westminster the picture is clearer: in 2024, the first general election on these boundaries, the Liberal Democrats took the seat on 46.9 per cent against a Conservative runner-up on 24.8 per cent, a margin of around twenty-two points. Tessa Munt, returned for the party that July, sits within that broader local advance rather than apart from it.

On the figures available, the seat now leans Liberal Democrat at both council and parliamentary level, with the Conservatives displaced into second and the Greens contesting at the edges. Recent local reporting has had a markedly administrative character, turning on council reshuffles, by-elections and routine service business rather than any single defining controversy. Taken together, the ward results and the 2024 margin point to a constituency that appears settled in its present direction for now, though one whose multi-party ward map leaves room for movement.