Paul Maynard MP has been appointed parliamentary under secretary of state in the Department for Work and Pensions.
He was elected as MP for Blackpool North and Cleveleys in the 2010 general election. He has served as parliamentary under-secretary of state for justice in 2019 and transport between 2016 and 2018, and again from 2019 to 2020.
His parliamentary record is broadly in line with the Conservative party whip. He voted to leave the European Union. His website focuses mostly on local issues.
Maynard has cerebral palsy and epilepsy and is an active disabilities campaigner.
He has a first class degree in history from the University of Oxford.
Jo Churchill
Jo Churchill MP has been appointed minister of state in the Department for Work and Pensions. She was elected as MP for Bury St Edmonds at the general election on the 8th May 2015. The first half of her career was spent in building, as the finance and operational director of scaffolding company SLS Ltd, which specialises in the heritage sector and in complex design work.
After a breast cancer diagnosis in her mid-forties, her interest in politics was rekindled as she campaigned for the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer. She became a councillor of Lincolnshire County Council, focusing on economic development, environment, education, and tourism and sitting on the health and wellbeing board.
Churchill realised she wanted to change national policy and successfully ran for Parliament at the 2015 general election.
During her time in Parliament, she has sat on the Women and Equalities and Environmental Audit select committees. She has also sat on All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) championing rural issues and founded the personalised medicine APPG.
She voted to remain in the EU.
In 2018, she was appointed assistant government whip. In 2019, she was appointed parliamentary undersecretary of state for prevention, public health and primary care and worked on the coronavirus pandemic response. In 2022, she was appointed as a government whip.
Prior to being given the Work and Pensions brief, Churchill was minister for employment.
From looking at Churchill’s active X account, health and rural affairs are clearly both passions, but her early career in finance and her interests in the environment and infrastructure may stand her in better stead for the pensions brief.
She is not entirely new to pensions; she is a trustee of scaffolding company SLS’ pension fund, according to Parliament’s list of registered financial interests.
