Peter Dowd


Peter Christopher Dowd is a British Labour Party politician. He was elected as the Member of Parliament for Bootle in May 2015. From 2017 to 2020, he served as the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

Early life

Dowd was born and raised in the heart of Bootle into a large working class Labour family with a long history of activism in the party. Educated at local primary and secondary schools and college, he gained undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Liverpool and Lancaster Universities and other postgraduate qualifications.

Political career

Dowd's great-uncles, Simon and Peter Mahon, were Labour MPs. Dowd was a Merseyside County Councillor from 1981-1986 for Bootle number 1 ward which is around the Hawthorne road area of Bootle and Derby park area. He became a Sefton Borough councillor in 1991 when he replaced Joe Benton for the Derby ward.
He was a councillor for Derby from 1991 to 2003, before he moved to St Oswalds ward. He was also chair of Merseyside Fire Authority in the 1990s. Dowd was elected Sefton Labour group leader after the death of Dave Martin, and was leader until 2015. He was consequently elected Leader of Sefton Council from 2011 to 2015.
In 2015, he was elected to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for Bootle, which forms part of the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton where Dowd was in local government. Bootle has traditionally been one of the safest Labour seats in the UK; Dowd succeeded Benton as the seat's MP.
Dowd was one of 48 Labour MPs to vote against the second reading of the government's Welfare Reform and Work Bill, which included £12bn in welfare cuts, on 20 July 2015. In doing so they defied the party's leadership, which had ordered MPs to abstain.
In February 2017, he was appointed to the position of Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.