Jess Phillips(1981–)

Jessica Rose Phillips was born at the Sorrento Hospital in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley on 9 October 1981, second child of Stewart Phillips, a Birmingham teacher of substantial Labour-and-trade-union activist standing, and Jean Phillips (later Jean Bruton), a Birmingham NHS midwife and women's-rights organiser. The household was working-and-lower-middle-class Birmingham-Labour of the post-Thatcher early-1980s decade: small terraced house in Moseley, the father at the Cocks Moors Wood Comprehensive School and the Birmingham National Union of Teachers branch-secretary post, the mother running the Birmingham Women's Aid refuge-and-counselling service from the 1979 onwards founding period of the early-Birmingham-Women's-Aid organisation. The family politics ran continuously Labour-and-feminist across the parents' adult lives; the daughter was raised at the Labour-and-women's-shelter centre of the Birmingham-progressive-political establishment of the period.

She was schooled at the Kings Heath Boys' School (the comprehensive school in the Birmingham southern suburbs that her older brother had been at), took the University of Leeds open-place to read for the BA in Economic and Social History from 2000 to 2003, and worked across the post-graduation period 2003 to 2010 in the Birmingham-Solihull voluntary-sector employment for women's-aid, refugee-asylum-and-immigration-advice, and Citizens Advice Bureau case-work. The small voluntary-sector apprenticeship through her twenties ran across the Birmingham-front-line-women's-shelter casework that she would draw on for the subsequent political-and-policy register of her career.

She took the Chief Executive post at the Black Country Women's Aid charity in 2010 at twenty-eight. The small Black Country Women's Aid organisation (the Walsall-and-Wolverhampton-and-Dudley women's-shelter-and-domestic-violence-services charity that ran the West-Midlands-wide refuge-and-counselling network for the post-1976 Sandwell-and-Black-Country Domestic-Violence Act services) had been running on a Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council and small Black-Country-Council voluntary-sector contract basis since the 1980s. The 2010 to 2015 small period was the foundation of the post-2010-austerity small Cameron-Clegg-coalition voluntary-sector-funding-cuts decade that the Black Country Women's Aid charity ran through; the charity lost about 30 per cent of its small annual local-authority contract income across the 2010 to 2013 cuts cycle. She ran the organisational restructuring across the period, kept the refuge-network open through the worst small 2012-13 cuts period, and built the organisation up to a post-2014 stable-funding state across the subsequent two years.

She was preselected as the Labour candidate for the Birmingham Yardley constituency in 2014 for the May 2015 general election. The small Birmingham Yardley constituency (the east-Birmingham suburban-and-mixed-immigrant Labour-Liberal-Democrat marginal seat that the Liberal Democrat John Hemming had held from 2005 to 2015) was the sitting Labour-Liberal-Democrat marginal of the 2015 general election; she won the seat from Hemming by a 6,595-vote margin on the May 2015 result and has held the seat through the subsequent four general elections (2017, 2019, 2024). She entered the Commons at thirty-three in the May 2015 intake, made the first-Commons-speech on women's-aid and domestic-violence policy on the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Welfare Reform Bill of June 2015, and was the immediate post-2015 voice of the Labour-women's-policy backbench position across the 2015 to 2020 Corbyn-Labour leadership period.

She was promoted to the Labour Shadow Cabinet on the 2020 Keir Starmer leadership election as Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, the post she held continuously through the 2020 to 2024 opposition period. She joined the Starmer Cabinet as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls on 9 July 2024 on the day of the Starmer-government swearing-in. She has been in the Home Office post continuously since and is the Labour ministerial figure of the Starmer-government women's-safety-policy work. She has been married to the electrical-engineer Tom Phillips since 2006; the couple has two adult sons. She has written four small books across the 2015 to 2025 period: *Everywoman: One Woman's Truth About Speaking the Truth* (2017), *Truth to Power: Seven Ways to Call Time on B.S.* (2019), *Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics: My Life as an MP* (2021), and *The Life and Death of A.G. Russell, Heart of America* (2024). The Phillips name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Philip (from the Greek *Philippos*, lover of horses); she carries the Birmingham-Yardley-Labour-women's-policy variant of it alongside the actress Siân Phillips as the two contemporary heads of the surname.