Geraint Davies



Geraint Richard Davies MP (born 3 May 1960) is Member of Parliament (MP) for Swansea West. Previously, Davies was the Labour Party MP for Croydon Central from 1997 to 2005. He had also served as Leader of Croydon Borough Council.

Local politics
Davies was elected to Croydon Borough Council in 1986 for New Addington ward, which he retained at the 1990 and 1994.

When Labour won control of Croydon Borough Council in the 1994 election, Davies became Chairman of the Housing Committee, and in 1996 was elected as Leader of the Council. He was chair of the Housing Committee of the London Boroughs Association -the predecessor of London Councils from 1996 to 1997.

Elections to Parliament
At the 1987 general election, Davies contested the safe Conservative seat Croydon South, coming third. In 1992, Davies then stood in Croydon Central constituency coming second. At the 1997 general election, he stood again in Croydon Central, this time overturning the Conservative majority of 9,650 and becoming Croydon Central's MP with Labour majority of 3,897. At the 2005 election he lost his seat to the Conservative candidate Andrew Pelling by just 75 votes.

Davies was subsequently selected for the Labour seat of Swansea West following the retirement of the constituency's MP of 45 years, Alan Williams. In the 2010 General Election, he won with a majority of 504, increasing his majority in the 2015 General Election and 2017 General Election to 10,598 over the Conservatives. MP for Croydon Central

In his first term in Parliament, Davies was appointed Chair of the Environment Transport & Regions Departmental Committee and served on the Public Accounts Committee.

Re-elected in 2001, Davies was appointed NSPCC Parliamentary Ambassador in 2003 (−2005) following his proposed Regulation of Childcare Providers Bill in April 2003 which meant childminders were no longer permitted to smack children and parents had the right to see records of complaints about prospective childminders in respect of child safety. These provisions were subsequently adopted by Government. He then proposed the Physical Punishment of Children (Prohibition) Bill in July 2003 which made striking children across the head, with implimeents or shaking them illegal. He sought to address children's issues with a Healthy Children Manifesto (June 2004) to ban junk food advertising to children and regulate food labeling (adopted by Government 11/06) and a School Meals and Nutrition Bill in January 2005 that sought to include nutrition in OFSTED and to ban unhealthy vending (provisions adopted 3/05 & 10/05). He also sponsored the Regulation of Hormone Disrupting Chemicals Bill (May 2004) to impose precautionary bans on chemicals with evidence of being dangerous. This bill was incorporated in the EU REACH directive 09/06 and supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature UK.

Private Members' Bills
On his re-election for Swansea West in 2010 Davies became the first newly elected MP to present a Private Members' Bill – The Credit Regulation Bill in July 2010 that received national media coverage and cross party support including an Early Day Motion signed by 203 MPs. The Bill penalises credit and debit card companies for facilitating the downloading of child abuse images and requires that pre-paid credit cards below £100 are only issued when the identity of those buying them is recorded in order trace their source if used for illegal downloading or underaged purchases of weapons or alcohol.

Davies' Counsellors and Psychotherapists (Regulation) Bill 2013–14 was designed to ensure that patients were treated by qualified practitioners using evidence based treatment. It explicitly seeks to ban so-called gay to straight conversion therapy, sexual grooming or activity with patients by practitioners.

Davies' Sugar in Food and Drinks (Targets, Labelling and Advertising) Bill 2014–15 aims to help curb the obesity and diabetes epidemics by requiring food labeling to express added sugar content in teaspoonfuls, restricting high sugar products as presenting themselves as low fat in advertising and requiring the Secretary of State for Health to set annual targets for sugar content by food category recommended by the Food Standards Agency. The Bill was reintroduced to Parliament in September 2016 and subsequently published.

Following publicity of Davies' Bill (10 September 2014) to criminalise the distribution of sexually explicit images without consent on the internet – known as revenge porn – the Justice Secretary has announced that revenge porn will be criminalised.

In October 2014 he proposed a Bill to prohibit the advertising of electronic cigarettes and to prohibit their sale to children.

Davies' International Trade Agreement Scrutiny Bill would require scrutiny of, and enable amendments to, international trade agreements, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (the proposed EU-US Free trade deal) and the Investor State Dispute Settlements (which threatens to give multi-national companies the power to sue governments for laws they pass which protect consumers or workers and thereby affect future profit streams), by the European and UK Parliaments. Davies asked the Prime Minister to support his Bill in the House of Commons on the day it was presented on 27 October 2014 and David Cameron responded "there's an awful lot of scare stories going round and this greater scrutiny can lay some of those to rest". The Bill was reintroduced to Parliament in 2016 following a Commons debate in December 2015. Since then, Geraint has become Rapporteur for TTIP on the Council of Europe.

In December 2015 Davies published his Fracking (Measurement and Regulation of Impacts) (Air, Water and Greenhouse Gas Emissions) Bill, calling for strict limits on water contamination and fugitive methane emissions.

Following the EU referendum in June 2016, Davies presented his Terms of Withdrawal from the EU (Referendum) Bill[21] to Parliament, which calls for a referendum on the terms of the exit package before the UK triggers Article 50 to leave the EU, with the option for people to choose to stay in the EU.

60 years after the Clean Air Act Davies introduced the Clean Air Bill to curb emissions and develop sustainable transport systems by road, rail air and sea. This included air quality targets, vehicle testing reflecting on-road conditions, air pollution measurement and warnings, powers to restrict and ban diesel vehicles in urban centres, a national infrastructure of electric and hydrogen filling points and a fiscal strategy to incentivise consumers and producers towards cleaner vehicles.

Geraint Davies sits on two select committees; the Environmental Audit Committee and the European Scrutiny Committee. He also sits on the Panel of Chairs, and regularly chairs Westminster Hall debates in Parliament.

Davies has called for the banning of fracking in the UK, cleaner air in urban centres, and for EU environmental legislation to continue in the event of the UK exiting the European Union.