Stuart Bell - Parliamentary Career

Parliamentary Career

Bell was elected to the City Council of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1980. In 1982, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough, Arthur Bottomley announced that he would step down at the next general election; Bell won the subsequent selection process to fight the seat at the 1983 general election. Bell comfortably held the seat, elected with a majority just short of 10,000 votes.

At Westminster, Bell became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition Roy Hattersley in 1983. He was promoted to the shadow frontbench in 1984 by Neil Kinnock as a Spokesman for Northern Ireland. However, he chose to resign his post after the Cleveland child abuse scandal which occupied two years of his life, after making unsubstantiated accusations of 'clinical error' against local pediatricians and child sexual abuse specialists. The pediatricians, Dr. Marietta Higgs and Dr. Geoffrey Wyatt, were later absolved and their forensic clinical work validated at a committee of inquiry overseen by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.

After the 1992 general election and the election of John Smith as the Leader of the Labour Party, Bell returned to the shadow frontbench as a spokesman for Trade and Industry. After the election of the Labour Government at the 1997 general election he was dropped from Labour's frontbench, but was appointed on the advice of Tony Blair as the Second Church Estates Commissioner, the spokesman for the Church of England in the House of Commons, a position he held from 1997 to 2010.

From 2000 to 2005 he was the Chairman of the Finance and Services Committee, which manages the annual budget of the House of Commons and its many employees. In 2005 he became a member of the Finance and Services Committee until 2008 when he served as Chairman until 2010. Relatedly, from 2000 until 2010 he was a member of the House of Commons Commission, which oversees the administration of the House and the Members Estimate Committee that sets MPs' pay and pensions. He was a member of the Liaison Committee between 2000-10. He was a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee from 1997.

Bell sat on the Members Estimates Committee at Parliament and was heavily involved representing MPs' interests in the MPs' expenses scandal of 2009. He was a member in Speaker's Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority between 2009-10. A founder member of the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body, he was a Treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Promotion of First Past the Post. and was Secretary of the Franco-British Parliamentary Relations Committee in the Commons.