David Laws, English banker and politician, Chief Secretary to the Treasury
David Anthony Laws (born 30 November 1965) is a British Liberal Democrat politician. The Member of Parliament (MP) for Yeovil from 2001 to 2015, in his third parliament he served at the outset as a Cabinet Minister, in 2010, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and later concurrently as Minister for Schools and for the Cabinet Office – an office where he worked cross-departmentally on implementing the coalition agreement in policies.
After a career in investment banking, Laws became an economic adviser and later Director of Policy and Research for his party. In 2001, he was elected as MP for Yeovil, succeeding former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown. In 2004, he co-edited The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, followed by Britain After Blair in 2006. After the 2010 general election, Laws was a senior party negotiator in the coalition agreement which underpinned the party's parliamentary five-year coalition government with the Conservative Party.
He held the office of Chief Secretary to the Treasury for 17 days before resigning owing to the disclosure of his parliamentary expenses claims, described by the Parliamentary Standards and Privileges Committee as "a series of serious breaches of the rules, over a considerable period of time", albeit unintended; the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found "no evidence that [he] made his claims with the intention of benefiting himself or his partner in conscious breach of the rules." His was among the six cabinet resignations during the expenses scandal and he was suspended from Parliament for seven days by vote of the House of Commons.