County Somerset Created 2010 European Parliament constituency South West England Number of members 1 Party Conservative Party | Electorate 82,882 (December 2010) Created from Taunton Member of parliament Rebecca Pow Replaced by Taunton Major settlements Taunton, Wellington | |
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Taunton Deane is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament by Rebecca Pow of the Conservative Party.
Contents
History
Parliament accepted the Boundary Commission's Fifth Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies which created this constituency for the General Election 2010 as a reduced form of the Taunton seat. The western wards, transferred to the new seat of Bridgwater and West Somerset for 2010, were all close to or in Exmoor, which were five in number:
The predecessor seat, while approximately 7% larger in electorate (and thus due to population and settlements' growth, oversized), had been held by a Liberal Democrat, Jeremy Browne, since 2005, who won Taunton Deane as its main successor with a relatively marginal majority. In the two previous elections, the seat had seen alternation between Conservative and a Liberal Democrat control. The Taunton Deane seat was won by the Conservatives in the 2015 general election with a large majority.
The last general election in which either party polled less than 38% of the vote, thus allowing a larger majority, was in 1987, taking into account only one of their notionally equivalent predecessors, the Social Democratic Party - their candidate participated in the SDP–Liberal Alliance.
Between 2010 and 2015, the seat was represented by Jeremy Browne, who served in the Coalition government as a Minister of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office.
Boundaries
The seat has electoral wards:
This borough centres on the town of Taunton while extending to include Wellington within an approximate rhombus-shaped swathe of land forming the south-western portion of Somerset.
History
In the 2005 general election, the victorious Liberal Democrats' candidate in Taunton required the smallest percentage swing from the Conservative MP for them to take the seat. In the 2010 general election, the seat was identified as a target for the Conservative party, ranking 29th on their target list. The incumbent, Jeremy Browne had a notional 3.3% lead from the 2005 election. Browne held the seat in 2010, increasing his majority to 6.9%, a 1.8% swing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats.
Constituency profile
The seat is a mixture of partially agricultural commuter villages and a spacious urban town, which has business parks in a similar way to Wells, connected by road and rail to the major conurbations, north and south, Bristol and Exeter. The majority of the eastern half of the ridge-like Blackdown Hills is in the Blackdown electoral ward. Workless claimants, registered jobseekers, were in November 2012 lower than the national average of 3.8%, at 2.6% of the population based on a statistical compilation by The Guardian.