Sonia Kumar

Sonia Kumar is the first woman and the first person of colour ever elected MP for Dudley. She describes herself as "the proud daughter of a greengrocer, an NHS physiotherapist and a true West Midlands woman", and she is Sikh. She attended Cadbury College and worked as a frontline physiotherapist at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Northfield and at the Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, graduating from Aston University with an MSc in Business and Management on 19 July 2024, fifteen days after her election. "The Prime Minister gave me a day off to graduate," she said.

The constituency is newly created from Dudley North and part of Dudley South, so voters were choosing a representative for a new configuration, not returning an existing seat. The campaign turned communal. Marco Longhi, the former Dudley North MP, sent a letter addressed specifically to "voters of the British Pakistani/Kashmiri community in Dudley", with Kumar's name in bold, capitals and underlined, asking whether she would advocate for Kashmir, the implication being that her surname meant she would not support Muslim Kashmiri interests. Kumar is Sikh, not Hindu; Longhi had targeted her religious and ethnic identity to a specific community as a campaign tactic. She told the BBC she was "disappointed and shocked" and answered with a pledge of "unity not division".

She was elected on 4 July 2024 with 12,215 votes (34.1 per cent) and a majority of 1,900 (5.3 per cent), with the Conservatives on 28.8 per cent and Reform UK on 26.4 per cent, within 873 votes of second place, on a turnout of just 51 per cent. She sits on the Business and Trade Committee.