Lucy Frazer

Lucy Frazer, born in 1972, is a former president of the Cambridge Union and later worked as a barrister in insolvency and commercial law. She was appointed QC in 2013. Frazer’s maiden speech to the House in 2015 was greeted with some criticism after she joked that Oliver Cromwell’s sale of Scots into colonial slavery was “an answer to the West Lothian question – but not one, of course that I would recommend”. She was chosen to sit on the Education Committee later that year and remained on the committee until 2017. In 2016, Frazer became PPS to the paymaster general Ben Gummer and was promoted to parliamentary under-secretary of state for justice in 2018. Following a brief stint as solicitor general for England and Wales, she became minister of state at the MoJ in July 2019. Earlier that year, a bill proposed by Frazer that makes “upskirting” an offence in England and Wales gained royal assent. Frazer backed Remain at the 2016 referendum but has since voted with the government on key Brexit measures. She has been a member of APPGs on future generations and legal aid. As prisons minister, she has focused on the new National Probation Service (announced in May 2019) explaining: “What we need to ensure is that where people may be better served by community orders that those are realistic options on offer to magistrates, that they are effective and have public confidence and can turn people’s lives around”. Correspondingly, in 2020 she announced that four new prisons would be built to improve rehabilitation services and boost the economy. In 2020, Frazer rejected calls from cross-party MPs to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 in light of new evidence about the development of children’s brains, and Scotland’s increase of its corresponding age limit to 12. Her department was also urged to act on the disproportionate number of children from BAME backgrounds being held in custody, but did not indicate that they would do so.