Born and Bred? How Local Are MPs, 1832 to 2024

How often have Members of Parliament come from the places they represent? I measure the birthplace localness of every member returned at the 49 United Kingdom general elections from 1832 to 2024: 31,737 returns of 10,094 people. Members and seats come from Wikidata; birthplaces from Wikidata, with English Wikipedia as a checked fallback; seats are placed at constituency points from an earlier open dataset. I report four precisely defined measures: the distance from birthplace to seat, birth within 25 km, birth in the seat's county on a fixed modern county map, and birth in London or abroad. Birthplace coverage rises from 30.7% of members in 1832 to about nine in ten from 1997 to 2019, so I report bounds as well as point estimates. At every general election from 1832 to 2005, between 21.1% and 33.4% of placed members were born in their seat's county. Since 2010 the share has risen, to 35.7% in 2019 and 41.9% in 2024 (bounds 30.5% to 57.8%), and the median distance fell from 82.7 km to 35.8 km. The change is carried by new members: 41.4% of those first elected from 2010 to 2019 were born within 25 km of their seat, against 28.4% from 1983 to 2005. Labour members are more often locally born than Conservatives, but both parties moved after 2005, and regional differences are larger than party ones. The data, code and an interactive map are open. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/mp-localness/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/mp-localness. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/29/mp-localness/.