Frank Field, Baron Field of Birkenhead
Frank Ernest Field, Baron Field of Birkenhead, was a British politician who served as Member of Parliament for Birkenhead for 40 years, from 1979 to 2019, serving as a Labour MP until 2018 and thereafter sitting as an independent. In 2019, he formed the Birkenhead Social Justice Party and stood unsuccessfully as its sole candidate in the 2019 election. After leaving the House of Commons, he was awarded a life peerage in 2020 and sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.
From 1997 to 1998, Field served as Minister of Welfare Reform in Tony Blair's first government. Field resigned following differences with Blair; as a backbencher, he soon became one of the Labour government's most vocal critics.
Field was elected chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in 2015, and was re-elected unopposed following the 2017 general election.
In 2018, Field resigned the Labour whip citing antisemitism in the party, as well as a "culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation" in parts of the party, including in his own constituency. Field lost a confidence vote in his constituency party a month before his resignation, after siding with the government in Brexit votes. His resignation of the whip also led to his departure from the wider membership of the Labour Party, according to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, although Field disputed this.
Early life
Field was born in Edmonton, Middlesex, on 16 July 1942, the second of three sons. His father was a labourer at the Morgan Crucible Company's factory in Battersea and his mother a primary school welfare worker at Belmont Primary School in Chiswick. His parents were Conservatives "who believed in character and pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps".Field was educated at St Clement Danes Grammar School, at that time in Hammersmith, before studying Economics at the University of Hull. In his youth he was a member of the Conservative Party, but left in 1960 because of his opposition to apartheid in South Africa and joined the Labour Party. In 1964, he became a further education teacher in Southwark and Hammersmith.
Field served as a Labour councillor for Turnham Green on Hounslow London Borough Council from 1964 until 1968, when he lost his seat. He was Director of the Child Poverty Action Group from 1969 to 1979, employing Virginia Bottomley on long-term research into income and expenditure for families below the poverty line, and the Low Pay Unit from 1974 to 1980.
Political career
Field unsuccessfully contested the constituency of South Buckinghamshire at the 1966 general election, where he was defeated by the sitting Conservative MP Ronald Bell. He was selected to contest the safe Labour seat of Birkenhead at the 1979 general election on the retirement of the sitting MP Edmund Dell. Field held the seat with a majority of 5,909 and remained the constituency's MP until November 2019.In Parliament, Field was made a member of the Opposition frontbench by the Labour leader Michael Foot as a spokesman on Education in 1980, but was dropped a year later. Following the appointment of Neil Kinnock as the Labour leader in 1983, Field was appointed as a spokesman on Health and Social Security for a year. He was appointed the chairman of the Social Services Select Committee in 1987, becoming the chairman of the new Social Security Select Committee in 1990, a position he held until the 1997 election.
Two nights before the Conservative leadership election in November 1990, he visited Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. He advised her that her time as prime minister was drawing to a close and that she should back John Major to take over the role. His reason for doing so was that he felt her Conservative colleagues would not tell her straight that she could not win a leadership contest. Following this meeting, he was smuggled out of Downing Street's back door. Two days later Thatcher supported John Major for the post and Major became prime minister.
Minister for Welfare Reform
Following the 1997 election, with Labour now in power, Field joined the government led by Tony Blair as its Minister for Welfare Reform, working in the Department of Social Security. Blair has said Field's mission was to "think the unthinkable".Field thought that the state should play only a small direct role in the provision of welfare and he disliked means-testing and non-contributory entitlement to benefits, which he believed should only be received after claimants had joined Continental-style social insurance schemes or mutual organisations such as friendly societies. There were clashes with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and the Secretary of State for Social Security, Harriet Harman – the Treasury was concerned about costs, while Brown himself was in favour of the poor being entitled to working-age benefits without having first paid National Insurance contributions, later established as the Working Families Tax Credit. According to The Guardian, Field resigned his ministerial position in July 1998 rather than accept a move away from the DSS as part of a wider reshuffle; the newspaper suggested at the time that Blair had been "disappointed" by Field's ideas for welfare reform. Harriet Harman also returned to the backbenches. In his autobiography, Blair wrote about Field:
The following year, Downing Street briefed the press that "harsh and authoritarian" measures were in store for welfare recipients and plans were made to abolish the DSS.
At the end of Blair's second term of office, the BBC reviewed his record on welfare reform up to that point:
The welfare reform most closely associated with Blair was not introduced for a further three years: the replacement of Incapacity Benefit by Employment and Support Allowance. The think-tank Reform, on whose advisory board Field used to sit, said in its 2016 report on changes to out-of-work sickness benefits that ESA had "replicated many of the problems of IB" and had therefore "failed to achieve its objective".
Return to the backbenches
After leaving ministerial office, Field continued with his duties as an MP and joined the Ecclesiastical and the Public Accounts Select Committees in the House of Commons.From the backbenches, he was a vocal critic of the government, criticising in 1999 the new Working Families Tax Credit as an approach which could not survive in the long term, and voting against foundation hospitals in November 2003. In May 2008, he was a significant critic of the abolition of the 10p tax rate and this led to Field describing Prime Minister Gordon Brown as "unhappy inside his own body". He later apologised in parliament for the personal attack. In June 2008, Field joined calls for the establishment of a devolved parliament for England.
On 8 June 2009, Field wrote in his blog that he believed that the Labour Party would not win the next election with Gordon Brown as leader. On 6 January 2010, Field was one of the few Labour MPs to back Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt's calls for a secret ballot of the Parliamentary Labour Party on the leadership of Gordon Brown. The ballot could have led to a leadership contest.
In May 2009, Field announced his candidature for Speaker of the House of Commons, but later withdrew his candidature, citing lack of support from within his own party. John Bercow was elected as the new Speaker.
In the 2010 general election Field retained his Birkenhead seat with an increased majority. In June 2010 he was appointed by David Cameron's coalition government to head an independent review into poverty, which proposed adopting a new measure centred around life-chance indicators and increasing funding for early years education. In an interview in September 2012, Field considered the government to have ignored his report, saying "nothing had been done about it" and that it was "very disappointing".
File:Nigel Dodds MP, Minister for Social Development, Nelson McCausland and Frank Field MP..jpg|thumb|Nigel Dodds, Nelson McCausland and Frank Field pictured in 2012
In October 2013, along with Laura Sandys, Field established the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger and Food Poverty, which he went on to chair. He also chaired a parliamentary inquiry into hunger commissioned by the APPG which reported in December 2014. Field became the chair of trustees of Feeding Britain, a charitable organisation set up in October 2015 to implement the recommendations made by the APPG.
Following the 2015 general election, it was announced in June 2015 that he had been elected to the chairmanship of the Work and Pensions Select Committee. He was re-elected unopposed to the role following the 2017 general election.
Field nominated Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015, stating that while he did not think Corbyn could win a general election, he hoped his candidature would force the party to confront its 'deficit denial'.
In June 2016, Field wrote in The Guardian that he supported Brexit, emphasising the need to control immigration due to it creating excessive demands on public services, roads and housing stock. He argued the EU model suited big businesses who wanted cheap labour, and supported agricultural interests creating high prices for food, rather than families. The Liverpool Echo reported that Field was "a long-time Brexiteer".
In December 2017, during a debate on Universal Credit, Field described the impact that Universal Credit changes had had on his constituents. His observations moved Work and Pensions Select Committee member Heidi Allen to tears. Field spoke of how he had talked a man out of suicide and how one claimant felt "lucky" his family was invited to eat food leftovers from a funeral.
Resignation of the Labour whip
On 17 July 2018, a vote was held on a rebel amendment to a trade bill, which aimed to force the British government to join a customs union with the EU in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Field, Kate Hoey, John Mann and Graham Stringer were the only Labour MPs to oppose the amendment, which was lost by 307 votes to 301. Field lost a confidence vote in his constituency, after siding with the government in these Brexit votes. On 30 August 2018, Field resigned the Labour whip because, he said, Labour was "increasingly seen as a racist party" and due to the "culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation" in parts of the party, including his own constituency. Some commentators suggested that he had "jumped before he was pushed".Field described himself as an "independent Labour MP". In September 2018, he said he would not trigger a by-election and would remain an MP. On 2 August 2019, he announced that he was forming a new party, the Birkenhead Social Justice Party.
Field voted for Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal in the "meaningful vote" on 15 January 2019, which May lost. Subsequently, Field voted for the Conservative Party-supported Brady amendment calling on the Government to renegotiate the Northern Ireland backstop part of the deal and abstained on the Labour party-supported Cooper-Boles amendment to prevent a no-deal Brexit.