Dame Vera Baird ( Thomas; born 13 February 1950) is a British barrister and politician who has held roles as a government minister, police and crime commissioner, and Victims' Commissioner for England and Wales.
A Labour Party Member of Parliament for Redcar from 2001 to 2010, Baird was a government minister from 2006 to 2010 and the Solicitor General for England and Wales from 2007 to 2010. She served as the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria Police from November 2012 to June 2019. She was appointed as Victims' Commissioner in June 2019 and resigned in September 2022, accusing government ministers of downgrading victims' interests.
Baird was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to women and equality.
Early life and education Baird was born in Oldham, Lancashire, and attended Yew Tree County Primary School and the local authority-run Chadderton Grammar School for Girls. She gained an LLB from Newcastle Polytechnic. While at Newcastle Polytechnic she founded and edited a student newspaper, Polygon. The next year, she was elected vice president of the Polytechnic Union. In 1983 she gained a BA in literature and modern history at the Open University.
Also in 1983 she became a legal associate of the Royal Town Planning Institute. She completed the first year of an MA in modern history at London Guildhall University from 1999 before transferring to the University of Teesside on being selected for Redcar. She is currently studying for an MPhil (History) at the University of Teesside.
She is an honorary fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and of Teesside University, and an honorary professor of London South Bank University. In November 2017 Baird was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Durham University Law School.
Legal career
Baird was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1975 and first practised in the North East, setting up Collingwood Chambers in Newcastle upon Tyne, with other young barristers, shortly after she finished her pupilage and becoming its Head of Chambers for some years.
In 1983 she was retained to act for Billingham Against Nuclear Dumping (BAND) when the then nuclear waste disposal agency NIREX planned to store intermediate-level nuclear waste in a disused anhydrite mine under Billingham, though the plans were abandoned in 1985 when the owners of the mine, ICI, refused to co-operate. At the conclusion of the campaign her fees were, at her direction, donated by BAND to the Druridge Bay Campaign. She subsequently represented similar groups opposed to nuclear-waste dumping threatened at Fulbeck in Lincolnshire (Lincolnshire Against Nuclear Dumping- LAND), at North Killingholme on Humberside (HAND) and at Bradwell (BAND) in a lengthy High Court action in 1986 before the plans were abandoned by the Conservative government shortly before the 1987 general election.
Baird represented a dismissed mother-to-be in an early pregnancy discrimination case (Brown v Stockton on Tees Borough Council) in the House of Lords. In the late 1980s she represented a mother who was alleged to have killed her three sons, an early example of a parent allegedly suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy. She acted for many political protesters, at Greenham Common and other peace camps and on anti-Apartheid marches and demonstrations, and defended women who damaged shops in protest against 'top-shelf' magazines. She represented local objectors in compulsory purchase and planning inquiries.
During the 1984–85 miners' strike she represented striking miners, most notably in North East England, charged with offences arising from picketing, demonstrations and the alleged intimidation of miners seeking to break the strike. On Saturdays during the strike Baird was regularly seen outside a supermarket in Jesmond with a wheelbarrow collecting food for miners' families.
Baird met the 6th Lord Gifford while working on the Orgreave trial where her questioning of the police proved crucial to the outcome. The Orgreave trial concerned allegations of riot and violent disorder against 95 miners, 15 of whom were in the first trial, which was abandoned by the prosecution after 16 weeks. She joined Gifford's chambers before moving to the Chambers of Michael Mansfield QC in 1988.
As a member of Mansfield's Chambers Baird was involved in many high-profile cases at the bar. She defended in murder cases, robberies, drug cases, fraud and bribery cases at the Old Bailey and on appeal to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords. She also prosecuted in environmental cases for Greenpeace.
In 1994 she represented the defendant in R v Carol Peters (the appeal and retrial), in which the Court of Appeal quashed Peters' murder conviction (alleged temazepam poisoning and the inflicting of 39 stab wounds on her husband) and ordered a retrial. At the retrial Peters was acquitted of murder, the defence being that she was suffering from battered woman syndrome, at the time an undeveloped area of law and fact. She also represented Emma Humphreys on appeal, a disadvantaged young woman convicted of murdering her violent pimp when she was 17 years old. The case drew attention to battered women who kill their violent partners and underpinned legislative changes subsequently made by the Labour Government when Baird was a minister. Baird acted for many other abused women following the Humphreys case and the legal changes that it brought about.
Other high-profile cases Baird has been involved in include the representation of murderer Jane Andrews in an appeal. She defended prisoners accused of rioting at Risley Remand Centre and at Strangeways Prison and continued to represent campaigners in many kinds of protest case.
In 2000 Baird took silk, 25 years after becoming a barrister.
Parliamentary career At the 1983 general election, Baird contested the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, finishing in third place behind the victor Alan Beith. Despite the party's landslide defeat nationally, she received an increase in the Labour vote. At the 2001 general election she was selected to contest Labour's then 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 that 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 worldwide 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 short history of the constituency the Labour Party had ever lost the seat in Redcar.
Backbencher
Baird was a frequent backbench speaker, winning adjournment debates on diverse national and local issues and in 2004 she was awarded The Spectator Backbencher of the Year Award. During her time as an MP Baird was a member of both the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. She delivered lectures at conferences on democracy, gender and human rights in many locations around the world and carried out election monitoring duties on nine occasions.
She was a notable figure in several parliamentary campaigns including that to remove the rule where pensioners going into hospital had to surrender their pension and reapply on discharge and in another campaign that sought, successfully, to amend National Insurance and other rules – the amendments meaning that the number of women who qualified for the Basic State Pension was greatly increased.
Higher profile campaigns included her involvement in a Commons revolt against derogation from Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights in which Baird often took the lead in Parliament and the blocking of the partial abolition of jury trial proposed in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 through the proposal of amendments in the Commons. Bob Marshall-Andrews, another MP opposed to the abolition of jury trials, gave credit to Baird's efforts by stating "Saving jury trial was a singular victory and the one of which, in thirteen years at Westminster, I remain most proud. Without Vera's voice we would probably have lost and that remains, as they say, big medicine."
During her time as a backbencher, Baird was involved in various activities and work outside of Parliament. She designed and delivered courses, in consecutive years, for the British Council on aspects of criminal, civil and family law firstly for Ethiopian judiciary and secondly to the Ethiopian Police Service. She was a Fellow of the Norfolk Trust in Summer 2004, visiting New Zealand, South America and East Africa to study her own topic of violence against women and, as is the obligation to the Trust, to study the chosen topics of her 3 Co-Fellows, which were HIV/AIDs, environmental issues in connection with mineral extraction and Health Service delivery.
Baird was a patron of the Jubilee Debt Campaign of EVA-Women's Aid of FOCAS (autistic charity) and ROC (disabled charity). She was chair of the Fawcett Commission on Women and Criminal Justice 2002 – 2006. This latter was a seminal review of women as defendant, as victims & witnesses and as workers in the criminal justice system which triggered a number of major legislative and non-legislative changes including the Corston Review on Women with Vulnerabilities in Prison. Baroness Corston succeeded Baird as commission chair when Baird became a minister. Baird worked with MIND on strategies to make the criminal courts more responsive to people with mental illness or learning difficulties and was secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party Women's Committee.