General Election night: Hour-by-hour guide

Here is a guide to when to expect the key results on election night.

The election is being held using new constituency boundaries, which means the results cannot be compared directly with what happened at the last general election in 2019.

To measure how well the parties do at the election, and to determine which seats they need to win to form a government, a set of notional results for the 2019 election has been calculated to show what would have happened if that contest had taken place using the new boundaries.

All majorities and swings mentioned below are based on these notional results.

– 10pm

Polling stations close, followed immediately by the publication of the exit poll.

It will be announced live on the BBC, ITV and Sky News, and will offer the first clues as to how the night will unfold. At each of the past few elections, the exit poll has produced a very accurate projection of the actual result.

Meanwhile, counting begins at venues across the UK for all 650 election results.

– 11pm

The first seats to declare are likely to be Blyth & Ashington at around 11.30pm and Houghton & Sunderland South at around 11.45pm: both in north-east England and both defended by Labour.

Houghton & Sunderland South has been won by Bridget Phillipson for Labour at every election since the seat was created in 2010, where she is defending a narrow majority of 3,271, while Blyth & Ashington is