Comprising the 83 parliamentary constituencies in the counties of Buckinghamshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey and West Sussex togther with the unitary authorities of Bracknell Forest, Brighton and Hove, Isle of Wight, Medway Towns, Milton Keynes, Portsmouth, Reading, Slough, Southampton, West Berkshire, Windsor and Maidenhead, and Wokingham.
At the 1997 general election the Conservatives won 54 seats, Labour 22 and the Liberal Democrats 7.
The Conservative vote in the South East region declined by 13 percentage points between 1992 and 1997 to less than 42%. In only 8 individual constituencies, in this their strongest region, did they poll more than half the votes cast. Nevertheless they still managed to win two-thirds of the seats because the main beneficiary of their decline was the previously third-placed Labour party.
The Liberal Democrats, as elsewhere, won a number of carefully targeted seats even though their overall share of the vote was lower than in wither 1992 or 1994.
The Tories would have won all 11 South East seats if a similar party list system had been used for the 1997 general election. The region will therefore provide a rare example, in the current electoral climate, of the Conservatives 'losing' seats through the exercise of proportionality.
Minor parties need a lower share of the vote here than in any other region to gain a seat and the Green Party has strong claims.