Wes Streeting facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Wes Streeting
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Official portrait, 2024
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| Secretary of State for Health and Social Care | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Assumed office 5 July 2024 |
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| Prime Minister | Keir Starmer | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Preceded by | Victoria Atkins | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Member of Parliament for Ilford North |
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| Assumed office 7 May 2015 |
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| Preceded by | Lee Scott | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Majority | 528 (0.8%) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 53rd President of the National Union of Students | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In office 1 July 2008 – 10 June 2010 |
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| Preceded by | Gemma Tumelty | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Succeeded by | Aaron Porter | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Personal details | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Born |
Wesley Paul William Streeting
21 January 1983 |
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| Political party | Labour | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Domestic partner | Joe Dancey | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Residences | Redbridge, London | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Education | Westminster City School | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | Selwyn College, Cambridge | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Signature |  |
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Wesley Paul William Streeting ( born 21 January 1983) is a British Labour Party politician who has been serving as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care since July 2024. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ilford North since 2015.
Streeting served as Shadow Secretary of State for Child Poverty from May to November 2021, as Shadow Minister for Schools from 2020 to 2021, and as Shadow Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from April to October 2020. He was also president of the National Union of Students (NUS), and Deputy Leader of Redbridge London Borough Council.
Contents
Early life, family and education
Wesley Paul William Streeting was born on 21 January 1983 and was brought up in Stepney, London. His parents were teenagers when he was born. He has five brothers, a sister and a stepsister.
Streeting's two grandfathers, both named Bill, were key figures in his youth. His maternal grandfather, Bill Crowley, was acquainted with the infamous East End Krays. He was "really well-read and well informed", and engaged his grandson in lively discussions about religion and politics. Streeting's paternal grandfather served in the Second World War in the Royal Navy and later in the merchant navy before becoming a civil engineer. He recalled: "He was the grandad I was closest to. He was a traditional working-class Tory."
Streeting grew up in poverty living in a council flat. He recalls Conservative Party politicians, particularly Ann Widdecombe, in the 1990s "denigrating single-parent families like mine, which I took quite personally". He attended Westminster City School, a comprehensive state school in Victoria, London, where he studied history, politics, and religious studies at A-level, receiving three A grades. He went on to study history at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Streeting had previously left the Labour Party because he opposed its decision to enter the Iraq War, but argued that Tony Blair did not act with malign intent.
Streeting came out as gay in his second year of university. He was elected CUSU President for the 2004–05 academic year, a sabbatical officer role. As President, he campaigned against the proposed closure of Cambridge's architecture department.
Career
As President of the NUS, Streeting was a strong proponent of his predecessor Gemma Tumelty's proposed reforms to the NUS governance structures, which had been denounced and narrowly defeated by many left-wing groups in NUS as an attack on NUS democracy. His election was reported by The Guardian as "a move that will lend weight to the fight to modernise the union". As NUS President, Streeting was a non-executive director of the NUS's trading arm, NUS Services Ltd, and of Endsleigh Insurance. He was also a non-executive director of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), as well as the Higher Education academy, having served on their board as Vice President (Education) when he was also a non-executive director of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIAHE). Shortly after his election as NUS President, Streeting was appointed as a member of the government's Youth Citizenship Commission, chaired by Professor Jonathan Tonge of the University of Liverpool, which published its report in June 2009. Streeting supported university tuition fees as president, consistent with UK government policy during the New Labour years. As The Independent pointed out, Streeting's decision put the NUS position on student fees to the right of the Liberal Democrats, who had just committed to a policy of free education for all.
Streeting worked for the Labour Party-related organisation Progress for a year. Progress was a pressure group created to support Tony Blair's New Labour in 1996 and continued to promote the thinking of the Blairite-Brownite wing of Labour until 2014. Progress was funded by David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Turville and coincided with Blair's announcement that he would abolish the party's Clause IV commitment to old-style public ownership.
After completing his term as President of the NUS, Streeting served as Chief Executive of the Helena Kennedy Foundation, an educational charity that promotes access to higher education for students from further education colleges. He went on to serve as head of education at Stonewall, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights charity (for one year and six months), where he led their Education for All campaign to tackle homophobia in schools.
He was subsequently a public sector consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which he gave up on election as a councillor, because Redbridge Council was a "current audit client" of the firm; this forced him to choose between keeping his job or forcing a second by-election. In 2010, shortly after leaving PwC, Streeting was appointed as Head of Policy and Strategic Communications for Oona King's unsuccessful bid to win the Labour Party's nomination to be its candidate in the 2012 London Mayoral election.
Political career
In a July 2010 by-election, Streeting was elected as a Labour councillor for the Chadwell ward on Redbridge London Borough Council, having stood unsuccessfully for that Council's Roding ward two months earlier. He held the seat for Labour by 220 votes, winning with 31.5% of the vote on a 25.5% turnout. The by-election had been triggered by a previously elected candidate subsequently being found to be ineligible to serve on the council. Streeting was elected as Deputy Leader of the Labour Group in October 2011.
At a public meeting of the Redbridge Citizens' Assembly on 6 May 2014, Streeting promised on behalf of his group that, if they won the election, they would not reduce the level of Council Tax support provided to low-income working-age residents. In May 2014, Labour took control of Redbridge Council for the first time and Streeting was appointed Deputy Leader of the council, with Jas Athwal as Leader. Once elected, the Labour council proceeded to cut the level of council tax support, so as to treble the amount of Council Tax paid by supported residents from April 2016; the council made a further reduction from April 2017, and made a third reduction from April 2018.
Streeting resigned as Deputy Leader in May 2015, shortly after being elected Member of Parliament for Ilford North. Whilst he remained a backbench councillor following his election to Parliament, he chose not to claim his councillor allowance. Streeting did not stand for re-election after being elected to Parliament, and ceased to be a councillor on 7 May 2018.
Parliamentary career
At the 2015 general election, Streeting was elected to Parliament as MP for Ilford North with 43.9% of the vote and a majority of 589. After being elected to Parliament, Streeting was elected Honorary President of the British Youth Council. In April 2016 Streeting criticised the Labour Party for refusing a £30,000 donation from McDonald's. According to Labour, the refusal was due to the company's poor record on worker's rights and hostile stance towards trade unions. Streeting campaigned in favour of the United Kingdom remaining in the European Union in the run-up to the 2016 EU membership referendum. He later campaigned for a People's Vote, a campaign group calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union.
At the snap 2017 general election, Streeting was re-elected as MP for Ilford North with an increased vote share of 57.8% and an increased majority of 9,639. Streeting is a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, a co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews and a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel. He is also a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims and a supporter of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East. In September 2018, he held the last in a series of London-wide consultations to create the Working Definition of Islamophobia. In July 2018, Streeting called for "targeted economic sanctions" against Israeli settlements in the West Bank in response to the Israeli government "grossly infringing on the human rights of Palestinians".
Shortly before the 2019 general election, Streeting told a Labour First meeting that the party faced electoral oblivion in any snap poll due to the leadership's poor handling of Brexit. At the election, Streeting was again re-elected, with a decreased vote share of 50.5% and a decreased majority of 5,198. Following Labour's defeat in the general election, Streeting nominated Jess Phillips and Rosena Allin-Khan in the 2020 Labour Party leadership and deputy leadership elections, and, after Allin-Khan did not win, subsequently endorsed Ian Murray for the deputy leadership.
After the election of Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party, Streeting was appointed Shadow Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury. On 16 October 2020, Streeting became Shadow Minister for Schools in succession to Margaret Greenwood, who had resigned the previous day following her opposition to the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. In the May 2021 shadow cabinet reshuffle, Streeting was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Child Poverty. He was promoted to the post of Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the November 2021 shadow cabinet reshuffle.
In February 2022, Streeting was re-selected as the Labour candidate for Ilford North at the 2024 general election. Streeting was ranked sixth in the New Statesman's Left Power List of May 2023, described as "one of the most prominent and confident members" of the shadow cabinet. In July 2023, Streeting apologised in response to the treatment of Rosie Duffield by Labour for her views opposing gender self-identification and gender recognition reforms – which have been criticised as transphobic – while acknowledging that the two had differing opinions on transgender rights. In January 2024, he supported single-sex wards in hospitals, with the possibility of separate wards for transgender people in the future. Streeting welcomed the final report of the Cass Review, which dealt with gender services for children and young people, in April 2024. He said that the report "must provide a watershed moment for the NHS's gender identity services" and "provide[d] an evidence-led framework to deliver that". In an interview with The Sun, Streeting stated that he no longer considers his stance on trans rights to be "some people are trans, get over it, let's move on." Instead, he reflects that "there are lots of complexities" in the ongoing debate, while affirming his continued support for transgender rights.
Political positions
Streeting is pro-devolution, supporting the idea of providing local authorities with greater control over public policy.
European Union and immigration
Streeting campaigned in favour of the United Kingdom remaining in the European Union (EU) in the run-up to the 2016 EU membership referendum. In 2018, he stated that a hard Brexit would address voters' concerns regarding sovereignty and migration but would provoke significant economic harm. Streeting appeared in The Sun and tweeted a link to the article saying he would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". On immigration, in 2018, Streeting said: "I regularly make the point that we need better education and training for our own people, but we should be honest with our country that we also rely on attracting people from overseas, particularly with our ageing population and shrinking working age population."
NHS
On health, in December 2021, in response to growing waiting times in the NHS, Streeting said the way to reduce waiting times was better pay and conditions, while keeping a check on the six figure salaries of managers and management consultants. Following a visit to Israel in May 2022, Streeting suggested that the UK should embrace new technologies in the health sector that are commonplace in Israel to improve outcomes. In January 2022, Streeting said that he supported the use of private providers in the NHS to cut waiting lists. In June 2023, Streeting said that the NHS requires three big shifts: "from an excessive focus on hospital care to more focus on neighbourhood and community services; from an analogue service to one that embraces the technological revolution; and from sickness to prevention."
Personal life
Streeting lives in Redbridge, London, with Joe Dancey, a communications and public affairs adviser, and in May 2022 they were engaged to be married. In October 2023, Dancey was selected as Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate for Stockton West at the 2024 general election but he did not win the seat. He has been engaged to Joe Dancey since 2013.
Streeting published his memoir One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry-Up, in June 2023. The book received generally positive reviews.
