Maria Caulfield

Maria Colette Caulfield (born 6 August 1973) is a British politician and nurse serving as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Mental Health and Women's Health Strategy and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women since October 2022.

She served as Minister of State for Health from July to September 2022.

Maria Caulfield was born on 6 August 1973 to Irish immigrant parents and grew up on in a working class area of Wandsworth, London.

Her father was from a farming family, but after emigration worked as a builder, while her mother was a nurse.

While Caulfield was in her teens, her mother died from breast cancer.

After leaving school Caulfield became an NHS nurse.

She has spoken about her upbringing saying that she "grew up in a run-down area of South London where the only careers advice given to us was the phone number of the local council housing office for when you became a single mum and needed a council flat."

As a nurse, she eventually specialised in cancer research and moved to the south coast of England, where she worked at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital and then the Royal Marsden.

Her career in the NHS lasted over 20 years.

She became involved with the Conservative Party after joining a campaign to save local hospitals in the Brighton area.

In the 2007 Brighton and Hove City Council election, Caulfield stood as a Conservative Party candidate and became a member of the local city council for the previously safe Labour ward of Moulsecoomb - winning by just one vote.

She served in the cabinet of the then Conservative authority and held the Housing Portfolio.

At the 2010 general election, Caulfield unsuccessfully stood in Caerphilly, coming second with 17.1% of the vote behind the incumbent Labour MP Wayne David.

She had been shortlisted for the position of Conservative Party candidate for Gosport in the previous year.

She received criticism from local political rivals for both campaigns on the grounds that her focus should be on her council work in Brighton.

In the following 2011 local election she lost her seat to the Labour candidate by over 600 votes.

For several years, she held the role of deputy regional chairman for the South East Conservatives and was a co-ordinator in the NO2AV campaign in the 2011 AV referendum.

In 2013, Caulfield was selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Lewes by the Lewes Conservative Association.

A member of the Conservative Party, she has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Lewes since 2015.

At the 2015 general election, Caulfield was elected to Parliament as MP for Lewes, winning with 38% of the vote and a majority of 1,083.

Caulfield backed Brexit during the 2016 EU membership referendum.

At the snap 2017 general election, Caulfield was re-elected as MP for Lewes with an increased vote share of 49.5% and an increased majority of 5,508.

In September 2017, she faced criticism after she hosted a Parliamentary event with the Royal College of Nursing to gain support for scrapping the below-inflation cap on nurses pay but did not take part in a parliamentary debate on this.

Defending her position, Caulfield argued the only way to lift the nurses' pay cap would be during a meaningful budget vote.

Although MPs who were first elected in 2017 have been banned from employing family members, the restriction is not retrospective – meaning that Caulfield's employment of her husband is lawful.

On 8 January 2018, Caulfield was appointed vice-chair of the Conservative Party for Women; the appointment was criticised by women's rights groups, including the Women's Equality Party, because she had opposed a Ten Minute Rule bill in March 2017 which sought to allow abortion to term and for voting in 2015 with the government to oppose the removal of the so-called tampon tax, currently levied on female sanitary products as the UK can currently not zero rate VAT on these products while a member of the EU She resigned from this position on 10 July 2018 in protest at the Brexit strategy of the Prime Minister, Theresa May.

In the House of Commons Caulfield sat on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, the Women and Equalities Committee and the Committee on Exiting the European Union until becoming a Government whip in 2019.

Caulfield employs her husband as her office manager.

The practice of MPs employing family members has been criticised by some sections of the media on the grounds that it promotes nepotism.

On 1 August 2019, Caulfield was made Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps as part of a government reshuffle.

In October 2019, Caulfield signed a letter to The Guardian pledging climate action.

Caulfield has also supported plans for a Green Brexit, by enhancing environmental protections after the UK leaves the European Union.

Caulfield was again re-elected at the 2019 general election, with a decreased vote share of 47.9% and a decreased majority of 2,457.

In March 2020, Caulfield announced that whilst continuing to fulfill her parliamentary duties, she would be answering the UK government's call for former doctors and nurses to volunteer in order to help the NHS deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In May 2020, Caulfield shared a 22-second video clip from her Twitter account which had been doctored to depict the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, apparently giving reasons as to why he, as the director of public prosecutions, had not prosecuted grooming gangs.

She accompanied the tweet with the words: "True face of the Labour leader #shameful".

In fact, Starmer had been answering a question about what the "wrong approach" was and why historic child sexual abuse allegations had been ignored for decades by the authorities.

The doctored video came from a Twitter account that had spread far-right and anti-Islam views, which was subsequently suspended.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "These tweets have rightly been deleted. The MPs involved have been spoken to by the Whips' Office and reminded of their responsibility to check the validity of information before they post on social media sites."

Caulfield later apologised.