Liverpool West Derby MP Ian Byrne has been named Member of Parliament of the Year after just two years in Parliament.
The Labour MP has scooped the prestigious Overall MP of the Year Award from the Patchwork Foundation - a national charity that supports participation in democracy. Mr Byrne was already well known in the city before he entered Parliament. He is one of the co-founders of the Fans Supporting Foodbanks organisation, which started off with foodbank collections before Liverpool and Everton matches and has now become a national network of projects.
Ahead of the December 2019 General Election, Mr Byrne, who was a Liverpool City Councillor for Everton, won the Labour selection to replace Stephen Twigg as the candidate to be the next Member of Parliament for West Derby. He won the seat with a huge majority.
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In Parliament, he has continued with his campaigning work to battle food poverty, leading on work to establish that a right to food is enshrined in law. It is this campaigning work that led to the Patchwork judges naming him as MP of the year.
The organisation said: "We're delighted to announce that our Overall MP of the Year is Ian Byrne, who the judges chose for his fantastic work combatting food insecurity, as well as championing greater access to justice and advocating for workers' rights during the Pandemic."
Accepting the award, the West Derby MP said: "I am sincerely humbled and honoured to receive the Patchwork Foundation's top award of Overall MP of the Year for 2021 as nominated by the public and selected by an independent panel. As a newly elected MP for Liverpool West Derby in 2019 I pledged to be a campaigning MP for the constituency and to take my constituents with me every day I went into work.
"I would like to think that receiving this award is an acknowledgement that I stuck to my word and that the efforts of my team and I have been well received in the constituency and beyond. I would like to take this opportunity to send a heartfelt thanks to each member of the team. It is the strength of our collecting endeavours which brings us here."
