Frank Field, Baron Field of Birkenhead

Frank Ernest Field, Baron Field of Birkenhead, (born 16 July 1942) is a British politician who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Birkenhead for 40 years, from 1979 to 2019, serving as a Labour MP until August 2018 and thereafter as an Independent.

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, then 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.

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 Director of the Child Poverty Action Group from 1969 to 1979, employing Virginia Bottomley on longterm research into income and expenditure for families below the poverty line, and the Low Pay Unit from 1974 to 1980.

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.

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 Party 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 that 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 Margaret Thatcher supported John Major for the post, and Major went on to become Prime Minister.

From 1997 to 1998, Field served as the Minister of Welfare Reform in Tony Blair's government.

Field resigned following differences with the Prime Minister; as a backbencher he soon became one of the Labour government's most vocal critics.

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 (DSS).

Blair has said Field's mission was to "think the unthinkable".

Field thought that the state should only play 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.

"Thinking the unthinkable on the welfare state has been one of the New Labour mantras since before the party was elected in 1997. So it has been a disappointment [...] that, eight years later, the thinking has still to produce any concrete results."

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 problem was not so much that his thoughts were unthinkable as unfathomable."

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:

Field was elected Chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in June 2015.

Following the 2017 general election he was re-elected unopposed.

In August 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 Labour National Executive Committee, although Field disputes this.

In 2019, he formed the Birkenhead Social Justice Party and stood unsuccessfully as its sole candidate in the 2019 election.

Field held the seat with a majority of 5,909 and remained the constituency's MP until November 2019.

After leaving the House of Commons he was awarded a life peerage in 2020 and sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.