Natalie Fleet, the Labour MP for Bolsover, has been appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, replacing Jess Phillips who resigned from the role on Monday citing a lack of “real change” under Keir Starmer’s leadership.
Phillips’ departure came five days after Labour suffered its worst local election results in recent memory, losing around 1,496 councillors on 7 May. In her resignation letter, she said she was not seeing the progress the country expects — a pointed assessment that added further pressure to a Prime Minister already facing calls from dozens of Labour MPs to step down.
Fleet, who has represented the former mining constituency of Bolsover in Derbyshire since the July 2024 general election, described her appointment as an honour and paid tribute to Phillips’ work on victim support, including her role in securing legislation to strip parental rights from rapists — a reform that passed into law recently.
The new minister brings a direct personal connection to the brief she now holds. Fleet has spoken publicly about being groomed as a teenager by an older man, an experience that resulted in pregnancy and which she has said shaped her approach to campaigning on child protection and women’s issues. She comes from a Nottinghamshire mining family and worked in trade unions before entering Parliament.
Her appointment has drawn a divided response. Supporters argue that her lived experience lends her a credibility and authenticity on safeguarding that few ministers can claim. Critics, however, have pointed to her previous votes and statements opposing broader statutory inquiries into organised grooming gangs, and her defence of Phillips against opposition demands for greater scrutiny of the issue. Some victims’ groups and opposition figures contend that her record suggests a reluctance to pursue full transparency around the ethnicity and scale of organised abuse in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale.
Fleet takes on the role at a moment of acute political difficulty for the government, with multiple ministerial resignations and sustained pressure on Starmer’s position as party leader. The safeguarding portfolio is among the most publicly sensitive in government, given continued public concern over child safety and grooming gang inquiries.
