St Ives is a parliamentary constituency covering the western end of Cornwall, including the Isles of Scilly. The constituency has been represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2024 by Andrew George, a Liberal Democrat; George previously represented the constituency from 1997 to 2015.
Constituency profile
St Ives () is a constituency in Cornwall in South West England. It is named after the town of St Ives, although its largest town is Penzance, which has a population of around 15,000. Other settlements include the towns of St Just in Penwith, Newlyn, Marazion, Porthleven and Helston and the village of Carbis Bay. The constituency also includes the Isles of Scilly which lie around off the coast.
St Ives is a mostly rural constituency with many small villages. It covers the south-western tip of Cornwall including the Lizard peninsula and Land's End, respectively the most southerly and westerly points in England. Many settlements in this constituency were historically reliant on tin mining. The coastal towns of St Ives, Penzance and Newlyn are traditionally fishing ports and are now seaside resort towns; this area is popular with tourists for its beaches and cliffs, and there are a large number of holiday parks here. The Isles of Scilly also have a significant tourism sector; the archipelago has its own council and is, on average, the warmest place in the UK. Most of the constituency has below-average levels of wealth; Penzance is especially deprived whilst Helston is comparatively affluent. Despite the deprivation here, house prices have been pushed up by the popularity of holiday homes, and the average price is similar to the UK average.
The St Ives constituency has low proportions of young and middle-aged adults and a large retired population. Residents have low rates of income, average levels of homeownership and above-average rates of child poverty. They have average levels of education and a high proportion work in the tourism, agriculture and retail sectors. The percentage of residents claiming unemployment benefits is below-average. White people made up 97% of the population at the 2021 census and around 20% of residents professed a Cornish national identity.
Most of the constituency is represented by Liberal Democrats at the local council, with some independents elected in the west. An estimated 53% of voters across the St Ives constituency supported leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum, similar to the UK-wide figure of 52%.
History St Ives has elected MPs to every Parliament since 1558, except for a brief period during the Protectorate. It was originally a mere parliamentary borough that returned two MPs until the Great Reform Act 1832, when its representation was cut to a single member. In 1885 the borough was abolished, but the St Ives name was transferred to the surrounding county constituency.
St Ives borough The borough established under Queen Mary consisted of the parish of St Ives in western Cornwall, a seaport and market town in which the main economic interests were fishing and the export of ores mined nearby. In 1831, the population of the borough was 4,776, and contained 1,002 houses.
The franchise was initially restricted to the town corporation, but after a judgment in a disputed election in 1702 the right to vote was given to all inhabitants paying scot and lot; in the early 19th century this amounted to a little over 300 voters. This was a wide franchise for the period, and its reasonable size meant that St Ives was one of the few Cornish boroughs that could claim not to be rotten.
Elections were usually contested. Local wealthiest families were able to exercise considerable influence on the outcome yet none was predominant. The result could rarely be taken for granted and it was necessary to court the voters assiduously. From the 17th century were three such families from the first: the Hobart family, the Praeds (at the time of Treventhoe manor), and the Dukes of Bolton (the Paulet family) – to which added by the mid 18th century the Stephens family. In 1751, however, John Stephens, who had previously allied himself with the Earl of Buckinghamshire (a Hobart) and managed the borough's elections on his behalf, "struck out on his own account" (defected independently) and secured the election of his son. Later in the decade Stephens and the Earl once more began to work together, but were unable to prevent Humphrey Mackworth Praed from establishing sufficient influence to sway one of the two seats.
By 1761 alliances coalesced, the Earl and Praed on one side nominating candidates against Stephens and the Duke of Bolton on the other. The by-election in 1763, when Buckinghamshire's brother-in-law Charles Hotham was re-elected after being appointed to a position in the Royal Household, cost the Earl £1,175 including 7 guineas each to 124 people, resulting in an uncontested election.
There was a further bitterly contested election in 1774: allegations of bribery were investigated by a House of Commons committee, whose proceedings are recounted at length by the contemporary historian of electoral abuses, Thomas Oldfield. Samuel Stephens, defeated by 7 votes, accused William Praed and Adam Drummond (the Duke of Bolton's candidate) of benefiting from several types of corruption. Humphrey Mackworth Praed, William's father, was said to have lent large sums to voters on the understanding that repayment would not be demanded if they voted for Praed and Drummond; but opposing counsel adduced evidence that Stephens had also resorted to bribery. However, it was alleged that many of Stephens' supporters had been prevented from voting, by rating them as not liable for scot and lot and so not eligible to vote; this disenfranchisement was a frequent abuse in such boroughs. His side, as petitioners, failed to bring any evidence of criminal misconduct by the parish overseers so the committee decided they had no jurisdiction to interfere. In the end, the committee upheld Drummond's election and declared that neither Stephens nor Praed had been properly elected, thus a writ was issued for a by-election to fill the second seat.
The cost of electioneering in St Ives seems eventually to have led to Buckinghamshire and Bolton withdrawing, and by 1784 Praed was considered unchallenged as patron. Nevertheless, Stephens' influence was not extinguished, and it was recorded that the patrons at the time of the Reform Act were Samuel Stephens of Tregarron and Sir Christopher Hawkins of Trewithan (who had purchased the manor of Mr Praed).
The Reform Act 1832 extended the boundaries, bringing in the neighbouring parishes of Lelant and Towednack and reduced the two St Ives seats to one. A new high of 584 voters qualified at the first reformed election, that of 1832.
On extension of the franchise in 1868 of the "Second Reform Act", the electorate never passed 1,500, and had fallen to barely 1,000 by the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885, the cornerstone of the third reform legislation, under which the "borough" for its parliamentary definition was abolished that year, the area becoming contributory to a larger county division.
St Ives county constituency 1885–1918 Division of counties into single-member constituencies was effected in 1885: Cornwall having six. The westernmost of these, in which St Ives stood, was formally The Western or St Ives Division of Cornwall but was most often referred to simply as St Ives or as West Cornwall.
This area included Penzance, Paul, Ludgvan and St Just, and stretched not only from Land's End to St Erth but also included the Isles of Scilly. This duchy seat was abnormally low in owner-occupiers, with many "nonconformist" Christians"There are places of worship for the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, Primitive Methodists, and Wesleyans, which last have also a meeting-house in the village of Halsetown" and the Conservatives were consequently very weak. However, local sentiment was strongly against Irish Home Rule or independence, seen as a particular threat to the livelihood of the fishermen and other maritime employees who made up much of the electorate, and St Ives therefore became a Liberal Unionist stronghold from 1886.
1918–present After the boundary revisions introduced at the general election of 1918, which brought in most of the villages on the Lizard Peninsula (though not Helston), the constituency was simply called Cornwall, St Ives. It underwent further boundary changes in 1950, bringing Helston into the constituency, and in 1983, when it was extended to include all of the Penwith local government district.
The character of the constituency was little changed by any of these revisions, but party loyalties may have been disrupted by the 1918 changes. Labour put up a candidate for the first time in 1918, and took more than a third of the vote; at the next election, with Labour withdrawing and the Irish issue no longer able to help Cory, a Conservative was elected for the first time. For the next decade St Ives was a Conservative-Liberal marginal, changing hands four times in the 1920s. However, the formal split of National Liberals from the Liberals offered a popular compromise which suited the voters, so much so as to be a safe seat, and later for Conservatives when the National Liberals finally merged with them in the 1960s, until the formation of the Liberal Democrats re-invigorated the competition in the 1990s.
Having contested the seat in 1992 and reduced the Conservative majority to 2.8%, Andrew George captured the seat in 1997 for the Liberal Democrats after the retirement of the sitting Conservative MP, David Harris. George took over half the vote in both 2001 and 2005, but his majority was reduced in 2010, before he lost the seat to Conservative Derek Thomas in 2015. Having unsuccessfully attempted to recapture the constituency in 2017 and 2019, Andrew George won comfortably at the 2024 general election – the ninth time he had contested the seat over a period of 32 years.
Prominent members 1885–date Walter Runciman held the most senior positions in Education, Agriculture and Trade taking together the period from 1908 until 1916 during the Asquith ministry. He was later re-appointed as the most senior minister in Trade from 1931 to 1937 in the all-party National Coalition Government.
Sir John Nott also held the most senior position in the Trade department before becoming Secretary of State for Defence, including during the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and the ensuing Falklands War. His assertion that he was cutting the defence budget before the war was not capricious and he offered his resignation to Margaret Thatcher, however she kept him for the duration of the conflict and he stood down in 1983.
Usual late count in modern elections At general elections, the constituency is usually one of the last to declare a result – the delay in bringing the ballot boxes over from the Isles of Scilly means that counting does not begin until the following day. In the 2015 general election it was the last constituency in the United Kingdom to declare, because the ballot boxes were flown in from the Isles of Scilly only on the first scheduled flight the following morning, having been kept in police cells overnight on St Mary's,Scilly's Polling Stations Open But Result Expected To Be Latest In UK, Scilly Today, 7 May 2015 with the declaration taking place at 15:30 on Friday afternoon.BBC News Lib Dems defeated by Conservatives in Cornwall (8 May 2015) However, in 1987 and 1992 the constituency did count during the night rather than the next day. The seat was declared at about 1:30 am in 1987 and about 3:45 am in 1992. In 2019 it was planned to fly the ballot boxes in overnight, but bad weather prevented this and the seat was the last to declare in the UK.
Boundaries Historic