Kitty Ussher - Parliamentary Career

Parliamentary Career

Ussher was elected as the member of Parliament for Burnley at the 2005 General Election, having been selected as the Labour candidate for the constituency through an All-Women Shortlist.

As a constituency MP her local campaigning has focused on bringing a university to the town, as well as greater funding for housing renewal projects and a direct train link to Manchester. She has also run a long-running campaign regarding changes to local hospital provision.

From 2005 - 2006 she was a member of the Public Accounts Committee. She was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Hodge MBE the Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry until 29 June 2007.

In Gordon Brown's first reshuffle she was appointed as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, succeeding Ed Balls. One of her first speeches was to London First's "Building the Capital's Capital". She described this position as "her dream job" and told her audience, "we want our decisions to be informed by your expertise. And more than that, we need them to be.”.

The timing of her appointment gave her a ringside seat at the credit crunch, party to crucial meetings of the Tripartate Committee of Treasury, FSA and the Bank of England as the authorities dealt with the collapse of Northern Rock, the subsequent financial crisis and its legislative response.

Her time also saw a review of the policy towards co-operatives and credit unions, to give them greater commercial freedom and ability to expand. She also developed the policy leading to the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act 2009 that redistributes unclaimed banking assets to community use, and the Savings Gateway Act 2009 that provides financial incentives to poorer people to save.

On 5 October 2008 she moved to become Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions taking on broad welfare reform responsibilities previously undertaken by Stephen Timms and James Plaskitt. At the time of the reshuffle, she was described by The Times' city diarist Martin Waller as "one of the brighter denizens of the lower depths of the Brown administration" who had "made herself popular enough in the City".

She became responsible for the government's review of housing benefit policy and a review of the social fund, as well as the Child Support Agency and welfare policy on lone parents.

In December 2008 she was the minister responsible for explaining the Government's position on charging interest on Social Fund loans. She said that the Government was “absolutely not” proposing charging interest on loans from the Social Fund, although a consultation paper was clearly proposing such an idea and included a worked example of interest charges. The idea was comprehensively rejected in the Government's formal response.

Ussher was moved back to HM Treasury in the June 2009 reshuffle, this time becoming Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury however she resigned to prevent embarrassment to the government regarding her tax position ten days later and was replaced by Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the MP for Portsmouth North.