Steve Webb

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steve Webb

This article is about the British politician. For other people of the same name, see Steve Webb (disambiguation)

Steven John Webb, better known as Steve Webb, is a British politician, the Member of Parliament for Northavon and the Chair of the Liberal Democrats Election Manifesto Team.

1 Background
2 Political career
3 Family
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Background

Webb was born in Birmingham on 18 July 1965 and attended the local comprehensive school (Dartmouth High School), before going on to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Hertford College, Oxford. At the age of twenty-one he left university to work at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, where he specialised in researching into poverty, taxes and benefits. In 1995 he became a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Bath.

[edit] Political career

At the 1997 General Election Webb was elected as MP for the Northavon constituency, just north of Bristol, overturning a Conservative majority of over 11,000. He increased a 2,137 majority to 9,877 in the 2001 Election and again to 11,033 in 2005.

In 2001, Webb was promoted by Charles Kennedy to lead spokesman for the Liberal Democrats on Work and Pensions, a portfolio he had worked in since 1999. He continued in this position until being appointed as Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Health in 2005. At the end of 2006, he started a new role co-ordinating the party's manifesto for the next General Election.

Webb is also a member of the cross-party Christians in Parliament and vice-president of the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum.

Webb is one of the growing number of MPs to have a blog and a website, and in 2004 his website, which makes use of SMS technology, was commended in the New Statesman New Media Awards and, in February 2005, led him to win the inaugural Hansard Society E-Democracy Award. He has also recognised the emerging potential of online social utility networks by joining MySpace and Facebook, two of the biggest. He is one of the contributors to the Orange Book (2004) and is the author of a chapter in The Future of the NHS (2006) (ISBN 1-85811-369-5) edited by Michelle Tempest.

[edit] Family

Steve Webb was married to Helen, then a curate at his local church in Clapham, in 1993. A year later, the couple moved to Bristol, where they remain today. In the interim, Webb has become a father twice: his daughter was born in 1995 and a son followed in 1998.