Jess Phillips(1981–)

Jessica Rose Phillips was born at Birmingham on 9 October 1981, second child of a Birmingham teacher and trade-union activist and an NHS midwife and women's-rights organiser. She was raised at the Labour-and-women's-shelter centre of the Birmingham-progressive establishment, her mother having run the Birmingham Women's Aid refuge-and-counselling service from its founding period.

She was schooled at a Birmingham comprehensive, read Economic and Social History at the University of Leeds, and worked through her twenties in Birmingham-Solihull voluntary-sector employment for women's-aid, refugee and immigration advice and Citizens Advice casework, the front-line apprenticeship she would draw on for her political career.

She became Chief Executive of Black Country Women's Aid in 2010 at twenty-eight. The West-Midlands women's-shelter-and-domestic-violence charity ran through the post-2010 austerity decade's voluntary-sector funding cuts; she ran the organisational restructuring, kept the refuge network open through the worst of the cuts, and built it back to stable funding.

She was preselected as the Labour candidate for Birmingham Yardley and won the seat at the 2015 general election, holding it through the four subsequent general elections. She made her first Commons speech on women's-aid and domestic-violence policy and was, across the 2015 to 2020 period, the leading Labour backbench voice on women's policy.

She joined the Shadow Cabinet on Keir Starmer's election in 2020 as Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, and joined the Starmer government on 9 July 2024 as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, the post she holds. She has written four books across 2017 to 2024, Everywoman and Truth to Power among them. The Phillips name, the Christian patronymic of Philip, she carries in its Birmingham-Labour women's-policy variant alongside the actress Siân Phillips as the two contemporary heads of the surname.