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, and Newcastle University where she gained first class honours in French and was first in her year. She subsequently gained an M.Sc. in International Relations at 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. 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] On 30 May, she was created Baroness Quin, of Gateshead in the County of Tyne and Wear.^[2] In November 2007, she was appointed Chair of the Franco-British Council (British Section). In 2010 she was awarded "Officier de la Legion d'Honneur" by the French Government. She was appointed a shadow Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs minister by Harriet Harman in May 2010, and was retained in that role by Ed Miliband after his election as Leader of the Labour Party. She stood down from this position in July 2011. Quin is the grand-niece of Labour Party politician Joshua Ritson (1874–1955). She authored a book on the British Constitution in 2010. ^[3]

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