Parliamentary
At the 1983 general election, Baird contested the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, finishing in third place behind the victor Alan Beith. At the 2001 general election she was selected to contest Labour's ultra-safe seat of Redcar, following the retirement of the sitting MP and former Cabinet minister, Mo Mowlam. Baird won with 7% smaller vote than Mowlam taking the seat with a large majority.
In 2004 Baird served on a number of select committees between 2001 and 2005 including Joint Select Committee on Human Rights 2001–2003 and the Select Committee on Work and Pensions between 2003 and 2005.
Baird was re-elected at the 2005 general election with a reduction in her majority. She then became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.
On 8 May 2006, she was appointed as a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Constitutional Affairs - which was renamed the Ministry of Justice in May 2007, following the reorganisation of the Home Office. In June 2007, newly appointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Baird Solicitor General for England and Wales.
In 2006 Baird commented that in calculating the sentence of a sex offender the judge had been too lenient; she retracted the comments after her boss Lord Falconer supported the judge saying the fault lay not with the judiciary but with sentencing guidelines. Judge Keith Cutler later suggested that criticism from ministers including Baird and Home Secretary John Reid could force judges to break their tradition of silence when criticised.
In 2009 Baird helped establish the Stern Review on the way rape cases are handled, an independent report by Baroness Stern, it was published in March 2010 concluding there needed to be a greater focus on victims.
In the recession beginning in mid-2008 the worldwide price of steel halved over a period of 6 months, steel production world-wide reduced and in the UK the blast furnace at Teesside Steelworks Corus was eventually shut down on 19 February 2010. The whole plant was then mothballed following the withdrawal of an international consortium that had been considering the purchase of the plant. There were over a thousand redundancies and the future of Redcar, as a steel town was undermined. A major regional campaign to save the steelworks was operating but, despite receiving praise for her own personal efforts in the campaign which had included a trip to Italy in an attempt to persuade Marcegaglia, the leading consortium business to keep to the contract, the view was that the Labour Government had failed to save the steelworks. Baird lost her seat in the House of Commons on 7 May 2010 at the 2010 General Election, with a 21.8% swing, the largest against Labour in the General Election and the first time in the history of the constituency the Labour Party had ever lost the seat in Redcar.
Read more about this topic: Vera Baird, Career