Ian Lavery

In February 2010 Lavery became the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party for Wansbeck.[6][7] He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) on 6 May 2010 with a majority of 7,031.

He was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Labour's then deputy leader Harriet Harman, but resigned in 2012 after breaking the party whip by levelling an amendment to exempt prison staff and psychiatric workers from a general public sector increase in the pension age to 68.[8] In December 2012, he said that miners with criminal charges related to the Battle of Orgreave should have them struck.[9] In the same month, he said in Parliament that he had been given a copy of a suicide note written by a constituent who had died by suicide after being told he was no longer eligible for state support.[10]

In March 2014, Lavery posed with one of his sons who had blackened his face to look like Michael Jackson. According to the Daily Mail, some of Lavery's constituents said they found it offensive.[11]

On 8 May 2015, Lavery was re-elected as the MP for Wansbeck with a majority of 10,881.[12] After Ed Miliband resigned as leader of the Labour Party, Lavery was considered a potential candidate from the left wing of the party to run for the leadership. He declined, and supported Andy Burnham in the subsequent leadership election which was won by Jeremy Corbyn.[13] In September 2015, Corbyn appointed him shadow minister for trade unions and civil society.

When Corbyn was challenged by Owen Smith in the 2016 Labour Party leadership election, Lavery supported Corbyn.

In 2016, it was reported that Lavery had received £165,387 from the NUM, the union he had run. A union fund provided him a loan of £72,500 to buy a house in 1994, which was written off in 2003 when Lavery was NUM president. He kept £18,000 returned by an endowment fund he had paid into to repay the cost of the house, and received £89,887.83 in termination payments from the union. He paid back £15,000 of the redundancy payment. Allegations of impropriety were examined by the Trades Union Certification Officer, who in 2017 found that there were no documents detailing the process or decision about Lavery's redundancy, so no investigation followed.[14]

Lavery was appointed as Labour's elections co-ordinator in February 2017.[15] In May, he was appointed as national campaign co-ordinator, serving jointly with Andrew Gwynne.[16]

In June 2017, Lavery was appointed to the role of chair of the Labour Party.[17] In July 2017, he was criticised for saying that Labour was "too broad a church".[18] In December 2018, Lavery raised in parliament the high insurance premiums of his constituents living near the River Wansbeck in the wake of the 2015–16 Great Britain and Ireland floods.[19] In the same month, he reportedly said that if Labour supported a second referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, the party would lose the next general election.[20]

On 12 December 2019, Lavery held out against a swing to the Conservatives in the North East and was re-elected as the MP for Wansbeck with 17,124 votes and a reduced majority of 814 (2.0%) over Jack Gebhard of the Conservative Party.[21]

Lavery in 2017

In January 2021, Lavery was criticised after he questioned why anyone would have faith in the COVID-19 vaccine and expressed concern about the time it took to approve the vaccine. In a statement, Lavery claimed that his words had been taken out of context.[22]