Stephen Byers

During Byers' ministerial career, he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions in the Cabinet.

Early career[edit]

Stephen Byers was born in Wolverhampton. He was educated at Wymondham College, a state-run day and boarding school, Chester City Grammar School and the Chester College of Further Education. He then gained a law degree at Liverpool John Moores University and became a law lecturer at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in 1977, a post he retained until his election as a Member of Parliament in 1992.


Byers was elected as a councillor to the North Tyneside District Council in 1980 and was its deputy leader from 1985 until he became an MP in 1992. Reportedly a former supporter of the entryist Militant group once active within the Labour Party – a claim which he says is untrue – Byers had publicly rejected the group's approach by 1986.^[1] In the 1983 general election, he contested the Conservative stronghold seat of Hexham, finishing in third place and some 14,000 votes behind the former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon. He was first elected to Parliament in the 1992 general election in Wallsend, a Labour stronghold, following the retirement of Ted Garrett, and secured a majority of 19,470.


In 1993, Byers joined the influential Home Affairs Select committee. He became an ally of Tony Blair, a fellow northeastern Labour MP, who was also in favour of 'modernising' the Labour Party. Blair gave him a job as soon as he became the Leader of the Opposition, placing Byers in the Whips' Office. He became a spokesman for the Department for Education and Employment in 1995, and he identified himself as an "outrider" for the New Labour project,^[1] regularly floating radical ideas on Blair's behalf to test reaction. An instance of this is when Byers briefed journalists in 1996 saying that the party might sever its links with the trade unions. Byers was swiftly appointed to shadow portfolios and became the Minister for School Standards with the title of Minister of State at the Department of Education and Employment following the victorious 1997 general election. While in this post, Byers drew attention to himself in a BBC interview promoting a Government numeracy drive, when he mistakenly said 8 times 7 was 54.^[2]


His Wallsend constituency was abolished in 1997, and he was elected for the equally safe North Tyneside constituency with a 26,643-vote majority.

Return to backbenches[edit]

On the backbenches, Byers kept up pressure for the Labour Party to keep to the centre ground. In August 2006, he suggested that Labour heir-apparent, Gordon Brown, should discard the inheritance tax to prove his "New Labour" credentials to Middle England. This suggestion was widely criticised by many MPs, who claimed that the publicity surrounding Byers' plan would "frighten constituents in the high-priced south into believing they would have to pay death duties, when most won't".^[7]


On 14 November 2009, he announced that he would be stepping down from Parliament at the 2010 general election.^[8]


Following the criticism of the Prime Minister over the budget of 2007, which dismissed the ten per cent starting rate of income tax as well as that of 2008, which included a planned two per cent rise in fuel duties, Byers accused Gordon Brown of manipulating the tax system for "tactical advantage" and urged an "immediate halt" to proposals to increase taxes on motorists. He also condemned the government's proposed inheritance tax reforms that had been launched in response to Opposition proposals to reform the tax. He went on to urge the government to carry out a fundamental rethinking of tax policy.^[9]