Worthing West.

Worthing West is a coastal South East seat anchored by the city of Worthing, which holds roughly three-quarters of its population, with the large town of Rustington adding most of the rest and the village of Findon and scattered rural settlement making up a thin remainder. The character is predominantly urban and older than the national norm: a median age of 47 and an electorate of just over 77,000 sit alongside a population approaching 102,000, only about three in ten of whom hold a degree. The seat is unusual in straddling two district authorities -- Worthing Borough Council runs services across nine of its wards, while Arun District Council covers three more to the west. That split makes it a place governed from two town halls rather than one.

That divided geography is mirrored in its politics. Across the seventeen most recent ward contests the picture is markedly fragmented: the Conservatives hold the most, seven, all on the Arun side and last fought in 2023, while the 2026 Worthing rounds split between Reform UK, the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats with no party dominant. Control, on the figures available, appears genuinely unsettled rather than tilted one way. At Westminster the alignment is different again: Labour's Beccy Cooper took the seat in 2024 on around two-fifths of the vote, overturning a substantial Conservative majority from 2019, when the Conservatives had polled well over half.

The seat therefore reads as one in flux rather than settled, its parliamentary swing to Labour sitting awkwardly atop a local map that has since splintered four ways. Recent coverage has had a largely administrative tenor, dominated on the Worthing side by town-centre and seafront regeneration and by the arithmetic of a fragmented council, and on the Arun side by the steady churn of local planning decisions. None of it suggests a fixed direction. On the figures available the constituency looks contested at council level and only recently won at parliamentary level, a combination that leaves its medium-term direction open.