Joyce Quin, Baroness Quin

Joyce Gwendolen Quin, Baroness Quin, PC (born 26 November 1944) is a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom.

Quin was educated at Whitley Bay Grammar School, University of Newcastle and the London School of Economics. She worked as a French language lecturer and tutor at the University of Bath and Durham University.

She served as Member of the European Parliament for Tyne South and Wear and Tyne and Wear successively from 1979 to 1989, and entered the House of Commons in the 1987 election as Member of Parliament for Gateshead East. After boundary changes for the 1997 general election, she represented the new Gateshead East and Washington West constituency from 1997 until she stepped down at the 2005 general election and was replaced by Sharon Hodgson.

Quin served as prisons minister, Minister for Europe, and as a junior agriculture minister. In this latter post, she played a key role in the 2001–2002 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which started in a farm near her home in Gateshead. She asked to retire as a minister in 2001 to concentrate on her constituency interests. She had intended to stand for membership of a North East Regional Assembly on her retirement from Westminster, but the proposed body was rejected by a margin of 4–1 in a referendum in November 2004.

In April 2006, it was announced that Quin had been nominated for a life peerage by the Labour Party.^[1] The news had already been revealed in a list leaked to The Times^[2] that eventually led to the Cash for Peerages scandal. On 30 May, she was created Baroness Quin, of Gateshead in the County of Tyne and Wear.^[3] In November 2007, she was appointed Chair of the Franco-British Council (British Section). She was appointed a shadow Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs minister in by Harriet Harman in May 2010, and was retained in that role by Ed Miliband after his election as Leader of the Labour Party.

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