Steve Reed has been named environment, food and rural affairs secretary – the role he shadowed in opposition.
He urged Labour to become the “party of the countryside”, and has spoken of wanting the government to support farmers through the green transition so the countryside is not “hollowed out” in the way he says mining communities were in the 1980s.
The son of a print worker and a nurse, Reed grew up on the outskirts of London and became the leader of Lambeth Council in 2006.
He has been Labour MP for Croydon North since winning a by-election in 2012. He has been the party’s shadow justice secretary, and before that held the communities and local government brief.
In 2018, Reed became the first Labour MP to pass a major act of Parliament since the party had left government in 2010, when his bill to protect people with mental ill health from violent restraint and tackle deaths in custody, known as Seni’s Law, became law.