Posted 07.04.20
Thangam Debbonaire: Further reading
The new Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has appointed Thangam Debbonaire as Shadow Housing Minister. We visited her website to find out a bit more about the Bristol West MP, who will assume the role vacated after five years by John Healey.
Thangam Debbonaire became the Member of Parliament for the Bristol West constituency in May 2015, transforming a Lib-Dem majority of 11,366 into a Labour one of 5,673. She won the seat again in 2017 and in the December 2019 election, the latter with a vote of 47,028 - the highest of any constituency in the UK.
She started out as a professional cellist, but for the 25 years before she became an MP her main focus was working locally, nationally and internationally to end domestic violence.
She moved to Bristol to be Women's Aid's first ever National Children's Officer, setting up support projects in refuges across the UK for children.
She was Shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport between January 2016 and June 2016; and in October 2016 she rejoined the shadow front bench when she was appointed a Labour Whip - a role she still holds.
Since January 2020 Thangam Debbonaire has been Shadow Minister for the Department for Exiting the European Union.
In her blog post on accepting her new housing role, she writes "We have a chronic shortage of housing, including social housing and affordable homes. Homelessness has spiraled upwards in the last decade of Tory governments. And we urgently need to make homes more energy efficient."
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