LABOUR and Co-op MP Seema Malhotra has been appointed as the shadow minister for skills and further education in September 2023. She returned to the front bench as the shadow minister for employment after Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader in April 2020, and later appointed as the shadow minister for business and consumers in a May 2021 reshuffle. Malhotra has been representing Feltham and Heston, the constituency where she grew up and attended school, since 2011.

She first entered the opposition front bench es in 2014 in the newly created role of shadow minister for preventing violence against women and girls under Ed Miliband. She served as shadow chief secretary to the treasury in Jere my Corbyn’s shadow cabinet but resigned in June 2016 over his leadership. Malhotra was a member of the influential Commons Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union, which functioned between 2016 and 2021. A former member of the Speaker’s Committee on Representation and Inclusion, she played a pivotal role in advancing the recommendations of the Good Parliament Guide. She founded the charity Hounslow’s Promise in 2018 to help young people fulfil their potential. At the end of 2020, she established the London West Innovation District in partnership with local business leaders, education establishments, and academics to lead a green recovery of the region from the impact of the Co vid-19 pandemic.

Malhotra is also the co-founder and vice president of the Fabian Women’s Network Mentoring Programme and a former chair of the Young Fabians. Malhotra serves as a commissioner for the Financial Inclusion Commission and leads several all party parliamentary groups (APPG). She chairs the APPG on entrepreneurship, cochairs the APPG on mortgage prisoners and is the vice chair of the APPGs on the future of aviation and assistive technology. Before her