Eric Pickles
Eric Jack Pickles, Baron Pickles is a British Conservative Party politician who served as Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar from 1992 to 2017. He served in David Cameron's Cabinet as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2010 to 2015. During his time at the Communities and Local Government department, Grenfell tower was renovated using highly combustable cladding, something Pickles was later heavily criticised for allowing during the subsequent inquiry following a fire at the tower in June 2017. There were calls for Pickles to resign as a Conservative party peer from the House of Lords, but he refused to do so. He previously served as Chairman of the Conservative Party from 2009 to 2010 and was later the United Kingdom Anti-Corruption Champion from 2015 to 2017.
Pickles was appointed the second United Kingdom Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues in 2015. He stood down as an MP at the 2017 general election, but continued in his role as Special Envoy under Prime Ministers Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer. He is the chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel in the House of Lords as of 2023.
Early life
Eric Jack Pickles was born on 20 April 1952, the son of Jack and Constance Pickles. Born in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Greenhead Grammar School and then studied at Leeds Polytechnic. He was born into a Labour-supporting family – his great-grandfather was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party, and Pickles described himself as "massively inclined" towards communism as a boy.Young Conservatives
After the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, he joined the local Keighley Branch of the Young Conservatives in 1968, later commenting, "I joined because of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was so shocked by the tanks. It was not the best way of fighting Brezhnev, but it made me feel better".Pickles soon became the chairman of the local Young Conservatives association. During his time in the Young Conservatives he became a member of the Joint Committee Against Racism from 1982 to 1987 and later became its chairman.
His period as national Young Conservative chairman saw growing factionalism with challenges from a southern-based right wing to Pickles' moderate leadership. Pickles also moved against right-wingers in Bradford, expelling the Young Conservative, Yorkshire Chairman of the Monday Club who had stood for the Bradford Wyke Ward on an anti-immigrant platform from the Bradford area constituencies.
Bradford councillor
Pickles was first elected to Bradford Council in 1979, representing the Worth Valley ward. From 1982 to 1984, he chaired that Council's Social Services Committee, and then, from 1984 to 1986, he chaired the Education Committee. Between 1988 and 1990, he served as leader of the Conservative group on the council. In September 1988 the Conservative Party gained control by using the Conservative mayor's casting vote to become the only inner-city council to be controlled by the Conservatives.When Bradford Council was hung, Pickles opted to break the agreement that the parties alternate in the position of Lord Mayor, when he put a Conservative mayor in place again. This effectively gave the Conservatives a majority due to the Lord Mayor's casting vote. To do this, they also broke the tradition that the Lord Mayor kept the status quo.
Whilst at Bradford, Pickles announced a five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, reduce the workforce by a third, privatise services and undertake council departmental restructures, many of which proved controversial. A book, The Pickles Papers, by Tony Grogan, was written about this period in Pickles' life.
Parliamentary career
Pickles was elected as Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar in 1992.At the 2001 general election, the independent politician Martin Bell, who had been the MP for Tatton, having run a campaign of "anti-sleaze", stood against Pickles, due to accusations that the Peniel Pentecostal Church had infiltrated the local Conservative branch. Pickles's vote was reduced from 45.4% to 38%, but he retained his seat by a margin of 2,821 votes becoming elected with 38% of the votes against Bell's 31.5%.
Pickles served as Shadow Minister for Transport and Shadow Minister for London from September 2001 to June 2002, then as Shadow Minister for Local Government from June 2002.
At the 2005 general election Pickles held his seat with 53.5% of the votes and an increased majority of 11,612, nearly as many as the number of votes for the Liberal Democrats' Gavin Stollar in second place, making this the second-safest Conservative seat in Eastern England, with Pickles taking the third-highest share of the vote cast in the region.
On 2 July 2007, David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, appointed Pickles to a reshuffled Shadow Cabinet as shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. On 30 December 2008, according to reports in The Times, Pickles unveiled plans to "purge town hall 'fat cats'". The Times reported that under the plans "dozens of council chiefs who earn more than Cabinet ministers would lose their jobs as clusters of councils merged their frontline services and backroom operations to provide better value for money." Of the eight highest-earning chief executives listed in The Times' report, six were employed by councils run by the Conservative party, one by Labour and one by the Liberal Democrats.
Pickles was the campaign manager for the successful Crewe and Nantwich by-election in May 2008. Following this, he was promoted to Chairman of the Conservative Party, a post he held from January 2009 to May 2010.
In early 2010, Prime Minister Gordon Brown outlined plans to reform the voting system in the United Kingdom. Pickles defended the first-past-the-post system as resulting in stable government and attacked Brown, claiming he "now wants to fiddle the electoral system" by wanting to change the voting system.
Pickles was the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in the coalition government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron from 12 May 2010 to May 2015.
Although a former Eurosceptic, in January 2016 Pickles became a founding member of the group Conservatives For Reform In Europe, a campaign to remain in the European Union on the basis that the EU would be reformed by the negotiations then being led by Prime Minister David Cameron.
In April 2017, Pickles announced he would not stand at the general election the following month. Later that year, he was appointed chairman of the journal Parliamentary Review.
Speaking live to GB News on 4 October 2022, Pickles stated that he had attended his 52nd consecutive Conservative Party Annual Conference that year.
On 31 July 2025, he along with 37 other House of Lords members signed a letter opposing the UK's plan to recognise a State of Palestine: the peers said Palestine “does not meet the international law criteria for recognition of a state, namely, defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states”.
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
Pickles was appointed as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government as part of David Cameron's new coalition Government on 12 May 2010, and sworn as a Privy Counsellor on 13 May 2010.In his role as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, on 30 July 2010, Pickles announced plans to hand powers where ministers can cap what they deem to be unreasonable increases in council taxes to local people. A consultation began in August 2010 and the powers, which will require legislation, should be in force by March 2012. Pickles said he was determined to reverse the presumption that Whitehall knows best by making local councils directly accountable to the local taxpayer. He said: "If councils want to increase council tax further, they will have to prove the case to the electorate. Let the people decide." Residents would be asked to choose between accepting the rise or rejecting it and instead accepting a rise below inflation with reduced council services. The average council tax on a Band D property increased from £688 a year in 1997/98 to £1,439 for 2010.
In August 2010, Pickles unexpectedly announced the closure of the Audit Commission for England and Wales. The commission had overseen the appointment of independent external auditors for local authorities, and supported audit work to ensure value for money and the certification of Councils' financial accounts. Closure took until March 2015. Commentators questioned whether Whitehall would struggle to check whether council services and finances were about to fall over, particularly when money was channelled through public / private companies. In the aftermath of a series of major financial crises at local authorities such as Woking Borough Council and Thurrock, identified from 2021, senior figures in local government finance identified the critical need to reinstate functions formerly discharged by the Audit Commission and for a strong system leader to oversee councils and local audit.
Pickles did not shun controversy as a Cabinet secretary. In The Observer, Will Hutton appraised his role with regard to local government as follows: "Local government minister Eric Pickles has colluded cheerfully with George Osborne to knock local government back to being no more than rat catchers and managers of street lighting. Indeed, they scarcely give them the funds to carry out these activities".
In December 2014, asked in Parliament if people who left their wheelie bins in the street after a collection should be punished, he said they should be flogged -though he also said flogging was too good for them and that leaving the bin in the middle of the road was poor behaviour.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was unearthed during Pickles' tenure, and in February 2015 he announced a strategy to implement commissioners at Rotherham Council in the wake of the Casey Report, which had been commissioned in 2014 to investigate child sex abuse in Rotherham. Seven councillors resigned as a result of the damning report, which revealed that the local authority was "wholly dysfunctional" and that the failure to protect 1,400 girls from sexual abuse was a result of "complacency, institutionalised political correctness" and "blatant failures of political and officer leadership".