General Election 2024: The Cornish constituency where a new MP is guaranteed

• ITV West Country's Kathy Wardle has been speaking to candidates ahead of 4 July

The fight is on to win in Camborne and Redruth, the only seat in Cornwall that will definitely elect a new Member of Parliament on 4 July.

That is because the previous MP George Eustice is not standing for re-election. The constituency has been held by the Conservatives for 14 years, and is now expected to be a tightly fought battleground. At the last general election in 2019, the Conservative Party won a majority of 8,700. Labour came second with 35.9% of the vote and the Liberal Democrats were third with 7% of the vote.

Hoping to step into his predecessor's shoes is Conservative candidate Connor Donnithorne, a local fish and chip shop owner and Cornwall councillor who lives just outside of Redruth.

Connor said: “I live here with my young family. We are facing the same NHS dentist waiting lists as thousands of people in this constituency. I want to secure money for Cornwall so we get more NHS dentist appointments locally, and NHS dentist provision in our rural and coastal communities.

"We want people to be able to travel shorter distances when they're not feeling well to get NHS services."Perran Moon, Labour's candidate for the seat, also comes from Redruth, and runs a business fitting electric car charging points. His mother was a nurse and his father is the former local GP Dr Charles Moon.

Perran said: "Labour will introduce radical changes as soon as we possibly can, with 40,000 more appointments a week nationally.

"We also have to grasp the challenge of housing. The reason that we have 30% of beds at Treliske [the Royal Cornwall Hospital] blocked by folk who through no fault of their own should be looked after in social care, is because we cannot attract nurses and social care workers to Cornwall because they cannot afford to live here.”

The Camborne and Redruth Constituency is much bigger than its namesake mining towns. It has an electorate of 73,101, and it is one of the 585 seats to have been altered following a review of constituency boundaries in 2023.

The seat now straddles two coasts from Perranporth and St Agnes in the north, to Mawnan Smith in the south. It also includes the former mining town of Hayle, with its picturesque estuary and miles of sandy beaches.

Hoping to tackle inequalities in housing is Green Party candidate Catherine Hayes, a town councillor in Hayle, and co-founder of the campaign group First NOT Second Homes.

Catherine says: “We're going to introduce the building of 150,000 social homes every year We're also looking at introducing rent controls and we're going to devolve the power to introduce those rent controls to local authorities.

"We're also looking at decent homes for individuals. If a house is empty and is not decent, then the local authority will have the power to be able to community purchase that and it will then go into social housing stock.”Another candidate focussing on the constituency's housing crisis is Roger Tarrant, Reform UK's candidate for Camborne and Redruth.

Born in Redruth, Mr Tarrant comes from a farming family and says solving the housing crisis means putting Cornish families at the front of the queue.

He said: “We need to put local people first, and look at brownfield sites. We have a large building programme at the moment, but it's not having any effect on local housing and rentals. We need modular homes that are good homes, so at least people can get a roof over their head as we move them on. We need to house local people and we want the planning rules to change to address that.”

Thalia Marrington, the Liberal Democrat candidate, is a piano teacher and Cornwall councillor who says she wants to be an MP to "restore trust in politics". Thalia says greater devolution to change the way housing decisions are made is a priority for her party.

Thalia told ITV News: "We do want power devolved to the lowest level as far as it can be. When decisions are made up there [Westminster] it just isn't effective when you're dealing with Cornwall and our rural issues.

"There are costs with the fact that we're so spread out, school transport or even getting people to hospital, with things like that it costs so much more. We need fairer funding in Cornwall because we have these issues.”

The Socialist Labour party's Robert J. Hawkins has ancestors who mined at Tolgus in Redruth. He wants to see a crackdown on second homes in Cornwall.Robert said: “We’d put a stop to that, it’s totally unacceptable that the rich should come from places like London, buy their second homes down here and force our people to be on the streets.”The Liberal Party Candidate Paul Holmes is a retired electrician and long term parish and county councillor. He would like to see a return of Cornwall's six former district councils, and greater devolution.“I'm the only candidate that actually wants a Cornish assembly. And I don't want any more decisions that deal with Cornwall being done in Bristol and London."

While seven candidates fight it out to win Camborne and Redruth this will become a battle between whether Labour can secure a seat in Cornwall now there is no incumbent, or whether the Conservatives can hold on to a seat that has voted blue for the last fourteen years.