Yvette Cooper

Yvette Cooper has been Labour MP for the Pontefract and Castleford area since 1997, in a seat renamed and redrawn in 2010 and 2024. Before Parliament she worked as an economic policy researcher for John Smith and as an economics journalist at The Independent. Between July 2024 and July 2026 she was Home Secretary and then Foreign Secretary under Keir Starmer, and on 20 July 2026 Andy Burnham appointed her Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

Her first government post was as a junior health minister from 1999 to 2002. She became housing and planning minister in May 2005. In July 2007, while she held the housing brief, the green paper Homes for the future set targets of 240,000 net additional homes a year by 2016 and three million by 2020; the House of Commons Library later noted that the credit crunch put those targets under serious pressure as house building fell sharply. Gordon Brown made her Chief Secretary to the Treasury in January 2008 and Work and Pensions Secretary from June 2009 until Labour lost office.

In opposition she was shadow foreign secretary from October 2010 to January 2011 and shadow home secretary until September 2015. She stood for the Labour leadership in 2015. Jeremy Corbyn won in the first round with 59.5 per cent; Andy Burnham took 19 per cent, Cooper 17 per cent and Liz Kendall 4.5 per cent. Cooper then left the front bench.

From October 2016 to December 2021, with breaks for the 2017 and 2019 elections, she chaired the Home Affairs Committee. Its July 2018 report on the Windrush generation called for compensation to be paid by the end of that year, an immediate hardship fund, a waiver of passport fees and full data on people wrongly detained or removed. The government's September 2018 response did not commit to a hardship fund, rejected the fee waiver and said compensation would follow a consultation; it reported that a review of about 8,000 removals had found 63 cases suggesting the person may have arrived before 1973. As a backbencher she also sponsored the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2019, which required the Prime Minister to seek an extension to the Article 50 period and became law in April 2019.

She returned as shadow home secretary in November 2021 and became Home Secretary on 5 July 2024. Two days later she announced a Border Security Command. On 22 July she told the Commons the Rwanda partnership was ending, saying it had cost £700 million to send four volunteers, and that asylum decisions would restart to clear the backlog. Two tranches of £75 million were announced for the command in late 2024. Official statistics for the year ending June 2025 recorded 9,100 enforced returns, up 25 per cent, alongside about 43,000 small boat arrivals, up 38 per cent, and a record 111,000 asylum claims. Cases awaiting an initial decision fell 18 per cent to 70,532, while people in asylum hotels rose 8 per cent to 32,059. Home Office data record 35,052 returns in Labour's first year, of which 9,115 were enforced and the rest voluntary; Full Fact judged a later ministerial claim that 35,000 people had been detained and removed misleading.

Her May 2025 immigration white paper proposed doubling the standard qualifying period for settlement to ten years and closing overseas recruitment to the care worker visa. In July 2025 the Commons approved, by 385 votes to 26, her order proscribing Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000. On 13 February 2026 the High Court found the decision unlawful on two of four grounds: failure to follow the Home Secretary's own policy, and breach of rights to free expression and assembly. The Court of Appeal overturned that ruling on 15 June 2026, and in July 2026 the Supreme Court granted permission for a further appeal.

She became Foreign Secretary on 5 September 2025 and a week later announced £142 million in aid in Kyiv, £100 million humanitarian and £42 million for energy repairs. When the UK formally recognised the State of Palestine on 21 September 2025, Cooper called it a step to preserve the prospect of a two state solution and said Hamas could have no role in Palestine's future.

At the Department of Health and Social Care she succeeded James Murray, who had held the post since Wes Streeting's resignation in May 2026. At Labour's conference on 30 September 2026 she announced a national collective pension scheme for care workers, promised a social care workforce plan and said Sure Start health services would return to up to 1,000 family hubs over two years. Reports of the speech gave no funding figures or start dates for the pension scheme or the workforce plan.