Caroline Lucas has said she is "confident" that her constituency will elect a new Green MP when she steps down at the next general election.

Ms Lucas, who has represented Brighton Pavilion for the Green Party since 2010, announced on Thursday she will not stand for re-election and said she wanted to spend more time focused on the climate crisis.

Speaking to The News Agents podcast, Ms Lucas said she had "no doubt" that the Green Party would not only retain the seat of Brighton Pavilion but also make gains in other constituencies at the next general election.

She said: “I have no doubt that we will keep the Brighton Pavilion seat Green and I have every reason to believe that we will win more Green seats, in terms of Bristol Central, Waveney Valley, as well as Herefordshire.”

Ms Lucas also said that she had hoped more Green MPs would have been elected since she first took office in 2010 and blamed the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system for preventing more people from her party from being elected to Westminster.

She said: “If I look at the 2015 general election, over a million people voted Green and if we’d had a system of proportional representation, we would have had probably at least another 20 Green MPs alongside me.

“It has been a hard slog. I have shown that we can win under first-past-the-post, but it has been hard being on my own.”

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Speaking more about her decision to step down as an MP, Ms Lucas said: “I feel quite emotional about it. It really has been the honour of my life to have represented Brighton Pavilion for the last 13 years.

“But, to be honest, I’ve come to the conclusion that as the sole MP for my party - having to cover every single front bench portfolio from benefits to Brexit and everything in between, it just means I can’t focus as much as I would like personally on the issues of climate and nature, that are the biggest threats that we face right now.

“When I think of the number of things that always going on in Parliament at any one time, the thing I find hardest is trying to work out which of the six priorities I should be doing at any given time, because I can’t cover them all.”

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In a discussion after the interview, co-hosts Lewis Goodall and Emily Matlis said that the next election would likely see Labour put up a fight to win Brighton Pavilion from the Green Party.

Mr Goodall said: “It will be very interesting to see what happens in Brighton Pavilion - to what extent this seat was a personal vote for Ms Lucas herself and to what extent the Greens are embedded locally.

“Locally, the Greens on Brighton and Hove City Council have actually gone backwards because there have been quite a few controversies about how they ran that council over the years. 

“Also, I think it is fair to say that this is a real loss for the Greens, because Ms Lucas has been and is, by far and away, their most effective political performer.”

Ms Matlis agreed and said: “Labour will be at their heels - they’ve got Peter Kyle in Hove, who is a very good performer for Labour.

“Presumably Labour is not going to sit and say ‘we have to leave Brighton Green’ - they’ll go after it.”