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Around Town Meets...
Local Government Minister
John Healey MP
By Stu Charmak
 John Healey is the MP for Wentworth in Rotherham, but has also served as a Treasury minister and is currently local government minister and floods recovery minister. As such he is a well-known South Yorkshire politician, so I wondered if he was Rotherham born and bred?
I was born in Wakefield, but spent a lot of my childhood in North Yorkshire. My sisters and I used to get the school bus 10 miles into Pickering and 10 miles back. When we got old enough, if we wanted to go to a dance or anything at the Memorial Hall in Pickering, it was a big expedition.
So, how did you get to Rotherham?
I first stood as a parliamentary candidate in Ryedale, York. At the time, I was a campaigner for rights and services for disabled people. I found that I loved the campaigning work, the getting out, talking and dealing with people. I found even as a candidate people came to me for practical help. I even built up a little caseload of people I was trying to help. Sometimes I could, sometimes I couldn’t. That combination of the politics, the policy, the campaigning, together with that almost pastoral role really attracted me. Having done it once, when it got close to the ‘97 election, I suddenly thought, I’d like to do it again and I threw my hat in the ring as a Labour candidate for the Wentworth constituency in Rotherham. They selected me; we came to Rotherham and we’ve been settled and very happy since.
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 Do you think being an MP is a job or a vocation?
It’s both but if you had to press me, I think it’s a vocation. I see it as a form of public service in a very special way that you can use your position to help people. Often you can tackle organisations and be a voice for people who don’t know how to make the right arguments. That’s important. The other thing you can do is bring people together. Sometimes you can broker agreements, or get people working together in a way that is difficult for anyone else to do. But it is a vocation. It’s not a job you can clock on and clock off and it’s also a job that expands to fill the time available for it.
What is the most satisfying part of your job?
For me the best part of the job is not the decisions I used to make in the Treasury or that I make about being local government minister or even the things I do in Parliament. It’s actually what I do in the constituency when I can make the difference by helping someone who comes to me at their wits’ end, not knowing where else to turn. It’s when I can help people who may be having trouble at work, don’t know where they stand, and I put them straight on their rights and that helps them, then in the end, that’s what this is about.
Do you think you have risen through the ranks quite quickly from being just an ordinary MP?
Yes, I’ve been lucky. My first job in Parliament was on the Employment Select Committee, and even before I came into Parliament my first priority has always been jobs. I just believe if people don’t have the chance to work they don’t have the chance to look after themselves, to look after the people that matter to them, or develop their talents. Then I was lucky again two years after I was elected; Gordon Brown needed a Parliamentary Private Secretary. This meant that if MPs wanted to get messages to him, wanted to see him, then they had to come through me. From that, after the 2001 election, I got made a minister.
 Do you find it difficult having a work/life balance, or have you worked that out now?
I suppose it’s a reflection of the way I look at what I am involved in, because for me it’s the motivation more than the job. I’ve been able to do things that have always been more than simply for a salary. The difficulty comes not for me but for the family really. This is a job which inevitably you spend half your life at home and half your life in London. That’s the worst bit. Leaving home on a Monday morning I hate. But I’m normally really tough about coming home on a Thursday night, so when that train pulls out of Kings Cross I start to feel so much better and different.
Then I spend my weekends like a 13 year old boy really, as much as I can with my son Alex, watching football, watching rugby, sometimes playing squash, watching films and reading books. That’s a great release and it also helps me keep my feet on the ground. That’s what I enjoy most, just being with the family.
To get away, my wife Jackie tries to take me out of the country, particularly to places that don’t have good mobile phone reception. But I love my work, otherwise it would become impossible to manage.
 Just going way back to when you were young, did you ever see youRself as an MP? What did you want to do?
I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was a teacher for a year, I worked in a long-stay mental hospital, working very directly day-to-day with patients who had been in there 30 or 40 years, trying to help them with rehabilitation to the point that they could start to live outside the hospital on their own. But you could only do so much because these people at that time didn’t even have the right to have their needs assessed before they were moved out of hospital. So the decision then was, do you continue to try and help people day-to-day like that or do you take a step back and try and change the system and actually that’s what I did. I went to work for the charity MIND, and wrote a new piece of legislation introduced in Parliament which gave new rights to disabled people.
One final question - what are you passionate about?
I’m passionate about being with the people I’m involved with. I’m passionatein the belief that government can do good and that we all, and particularly people like me in my position, have a duty to help those that need help and that can be a really tough challenge, but you’ve got to do what you can. And I’m very passionate about trying to see things change and improve round here.
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