MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Transport expert named to UK Overseas Territories

Ms. Gillian Merron MP

Gillian Merron has been named United Kingdom Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, effective October 5. She joins the five-member ministerial team at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, led by Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

Ms. Merron's responsibilities include the Overseas Territories and the Caribbean, as well as South America, Central America, Australasia and the Pacific, consular policy, business, protocol, and diversity. As PPS to two Ministers at the Ministry of Defence she has visited the Falkland Islands. Prior to this appointment, Ms. Merron was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for International Development. She has been a Member of Parliament since 1997. Born in Ilford, Essex, in 1959 of Jewish origins, daughter of a factory storekeeper and a shop assistant, Gillian Merron was educated at Wanstead High School and Lancaster University, where she took a BSc in management sciences. She joined the Labour Party at twenty-three, and worked as a business development adviser, then a local government officer, before becoming an official of the National Union of Public Employees, now Unison. She co-ordinated Labour's Central Region campaigns in the 1992 general election and 1994 European Parliament elections. Selected from a women-only list in 1997, she won the weathervane seat of Lincoln comfortably at her first attempt, after boundary changes made it once again winnable for Labour. In her first term in Parliament she served as a PPS to two Ministers at the Ministry of Defence. She returned again in 2001 with only a fractional swing to the Conservatives and spent a year as PPS to John Reid as Northern Ireland Secretary. In 2002 she became an assistant Government Whip and a full Government Whip from 2004 until her promotion to the Department for Transport. After four years as a Parliamentary aide and four more as a Whip, she finally took off as junior Aviation Minister at the Department for Transport in 2006. A year later she moved sideways to the Cabinet Office, where Gordon Brown made her Parliamentary Secretary for Social Exclusion and the Civil Service. She also became Minister for the East Midlands. In January 2008 she moved sideways again to the Department for International Development in the reshuffle following Peter Hain's resignation. And in the recent cabinet she has been moved to Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a post previously held by Meg Munn MP. She has taken part in a scheme to familiarise herself with the RAF and put forward a Ten-Minute Rule Bill, the Football Sponsorship Levy Bill, aimed at spreading television revenue around the smaller clubs like her own Lincoln Imps. She is concerned about vocational training and transport and is particularly interested in the link between exercise and sport and is a former unpaid director of East Midlands Sport. She is a member of many groups: Amnesty International, the Cats Protection League, Lincoln Civic Trust, Unison and the Co-operative Party. She is also a supporter of the Holocaust Educational Trust, Hearing Dogs for Deaf People and Girl-guiding UK. She has visited Israel as a guest of Labour Friends of Israel. She is single, and likes films, football, running and the gym. In 2005 she did five weeks volunteering in Guyana with VSO, working with the Guyana Teachers Union.