Pam Cox

Pam Cox was elected Labour MP for Colchester on 4 July 2024 with 18,804 votes (42.0 per cent) and a majority of 8,250 (18.4 per cent), defeating Conservative Will Quince. She became the first woman to represent Colchester and the first Labour MP for the constituency since 1945, a gap of 79 years. She is a Cambridge educated historian with a PhD, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a BBC documentary presenter, and a published author on criminal justice history.

Born in Southend-on-Sea into a working class family, she read history at Robinson College, Cambridge, and took her Cambridge PhD in 1997 on girls, delinquency and industrial schools, a doctoral specialism in young women and criminal justice that directly informs her policy work on youth justice, vulnerable mothers and victims' rights. She became a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Essex and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and her BBC Two history documentaries, including Shopgirls and Servants, made her a familiar broadcaster. "I am not a career politician," she told the Commons in her maiden speech. "I have spent most of my life researching, teaching and leading in higher education." Before Parliament she advised the Victims Commissioner and developed services for vulnerable mothers, and her research into recurrent care proceedings informs her work on family courts and social care.

In Parliament she sits on the Justice Committee, a placement that maps directly onto her academic specialism in criminal justice, and on the Armed Forces Bill committees and other public bill committees.