Sarah Owen is the Labour MP for Luton North, having first been elected to parliament at the 2019 general election.

In the 2024 general election, Owen received 14,677 votes, representing 37.9% of the vote share. The Conservative candidate, Jilleane Brown, received 7,167 votes (18.5%), while the Reform UK candidate, James Fletcher, secured 4,666 votes (12.0%). Owen was duly re-elected with a majority of 7,510 votes.

The Luton North constituency covers the northern part of the town of Luton in Bedfordshire. It includes neighbourhoods such as Leagrave, Limbury, Sundon Park, and Bramingham. The local economy is influenced by London Luton Airport.

The seat has been held by Labour since 1997, when Kelvin Hopkins gained it from the Conservatives, who had held it from 1983. It is now considered a safe Labour sea. The constituency boundaries were expanded slightly for the 2024 election, incorporating the Stopsley ward.

Political Career

Owen currently serves as parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Northern Ireland Office. She was appointed to this role in July 2026, following the Labour leadership contest and Andy Burnham’s elevation as prime minister.

Previously, Owen served as chair of the House of Commons women and equalities select committee (2024-2026) – the committee responsible for holding the government to account on equality law and policy, including the Equality Act 2010, as well as cross government activity on equalities. By virtue of this role, Owen sat on the liaison committee – the so-called “super committee” composed of the cross-party chairs of all the other commons select committees.

In January 2026, the women and equalities committee that Owen chaired decided to stop using X after the social media site’s AI tool, “Grok”, started to generate thousands of digitally altered images of women and children. In a statement, Owen said that it had “become increasingly clear that X is not an appropriate platform to be using for our communications”.

Owen was reportedly urged to stand in the 2025 Labour deputy leadership election but chose not to.

In an op-ed for Luton Today, published on 9 September 2025, Owen stated: “The deputy leadership contest should focus on reconnecting with the working people Labour was founded to represent. Last year, people in Luton voted for change.

“If Labour doesn’t act now for people in towns like mine, we’ll stand on the edge of a hard-right, Reform government led by Nigel Farage.”

In November 2025, Owen was among the seven Labour MPs who set out to revive the parliamentary Tribune Group – an influential caucus representing the party’s “soft left”. Led by Louise Haigh and Vicky Foxcroft, the group was relaunched to provide an organised voice for the centre-left wing of the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

The Tribune group was initially formed in 1964 to support the newspaper of the same name. It served as a prominent forum for those parliamentarians situated on the left of the Labour Party – but it split over Tony Benn’s campaign for the deputy leadership in 1981. Benn’s supporters founded the Campaign group – which evolved into the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG). Today, the Bennite SCG is strongly associated with the Labour left tradition.

During the 1980s, the Tribune group emerged as a more natural home for those on Labour’s “soft left”.

In 2017, the group was relaunched by veteran Labour MP Clive Efford with a mission statement calling for “opportunity and aspiration” to be placed at the heart of the party’s programme. Efford said he had reformed the group to ensure that the centre-left would “have a space in which to put forward ideas and debate which has not been there under successive leaders”.

Owen was among those who again relaunched the group in November 2025. Its leading figures included Haigh, Foxcroft, Debbie Abrahams, Beccy Cooper, Justin Madders, and Yuan Yang.

In a January 2026 article for LabourList, co-written by this collective, the MPs argued that the party leadership had not “clarified who we stand for, clarity is just as often gained by who we stand against.”

The article added: “So what does a centre-left economic vision look like in practice? First, an economy that serves people, communities, and the common good. That’s why measures like bringing our railways back into public ownership matter.

“When we own essential natural monopolies such as these, we can demand the service we deserve and protect ourselves from predatory practices…

“Labour wins when – as the Tribunes of Rome were charged with doing – it protects and leads the people. We are here to help the Party to remember that mission and to deliver on it.”

Prior to the 2024 general election, which saw Labour returned to power after 14 years in opposition, Owen served in a series of shadow ministerial roles. She was shadow minister for local government and faith (October 2022 – November 2023), having previously held the brief for homelessness, rough sleeping and faith (December 2021 – October 2022).

Owen also served as an opposition whip from May 2021 to January 2023.

Owen resigned from the frontbench in November 2023 to vote in favour of a motion tabled by the Scottish National Party (SNP) calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza – defying the instruction set out by the party’s frontbench. Labour had tabled its own motion, making a more moderate appeal for a “humanitarian pause” in the conflict and ordered its representatives to support that stance.

In a statement setting out she voted for the SNP amendment, written alongside Luton South MP Luton South, Owen said that they “voted with our conscience”.

The Luton MPs stated: “Today we voted for an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for a ceasefire on all sides, to see the immediate end to violence against innocent civilians, the release of hostages and the vital access of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

“These calls are reflected by the overwhelming majority of the British public and respected organisations such as the UN, International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, Islamic Relief and faith leaders ranging from the Pope to our local Mosque leaders.

“We have worked every parliamentary avenue on these aims and have voted with our conscience, which is a feeling we share with our diverse town and constituents who want to see peace across the Middle East.”

Owen is listed as co-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME) alongside fellow Labour MP Andrew Pakes. The organisation’s stated aim is to promote peace and justice in the region through the application of international law and respect for human rights.

In an April 2025 LabourList article, Owen and Pakes called on the government to recognise Palestine immediately.

They wrote: “Our longstanding position is that the UK government should immediately recognise the State of Palestine as an essential marker on the path to a two-state solution…

“What recent events have shown more than anything is that we cannot continue to feed the status quo and that there must be a strong international effort to change it.

“The old ways of approaching this are failing Palestinians and they’re failing regional security, leading only to the erosion of the territorial viability for a Palestinian state. The longer we wait, the more impossible a two-state solution will become.”

In October 2020, Owen was one of the 34 Labour MPs to break the party whip by voting against the covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill at its commons third reading. The proposed legislation, often referred to as the “spycops bill”, was introduced by the Conservative government to authorise undercover agents and informants to commit crimes while on operations. The Labour Party had whipped its representatives to abstain on the bill on the basis that the legislation is “far from perfect” yet “necessary” due to “the need to provide a clear lawful framework for the use of human intelligence sources”.

Owen was a member of the public accounts committee (2023-2024), the health and social care committee (2020-2022), and the business and trade committee (2021-2022).

Owen is listed as a member of the all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) for brain tumours, British Muslims and Pakistan

Owen delivered her maiden speech on 16 January 2020 during a debate on health and social care.

In it, she said: “Even in these challenging times, Luton has always punched above its weight. Together, the people of Luton make the town the fantastic place it is. The mosques, churches, businesses and wider community have come together to support Luton’s food bank, making sure the most vulnerable in our community are looked after.”

She added: “My mother came to this country from Malaysia 46 years ago, and she is still an NHS nurse today. She is just like many people who come to this country from across the world to work in our fantastic NHS, and we should never forget the debt we owe them.”

Owen was the Labour candidate for Hastings and Rye in the 2015 general election, finishing second to the Conservative incumbent, Amber Rudd, with 17,890 votes (35.1%).

Political Views

Leadership elections and loyalty

Starmer stand down: In May 2026, Owen publicly called for Keir Starmer, the prime minister, to step down/set out a timetable for his departure. The move followed the 2026 local elections and devolved elections to the Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru.

Labour deputy leadership 2025: Owen was one of 117 Labour MPs who nominated Lucy Powell for the party’s deputy leadership in September 2025. The election followed the resignation of Angela Rayner, who stepped down as deputy prime minister and deputy party leader after an investigation into her tax affairs. It marked the first time since 2007 that Labour had held a deputy leadership contest while in government.

Powell, the former leader of the House of Commons, was seen as a candidate representing the party’s “soft left”; she was supported by leading soft left figures including Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham. She secured 117 nominations from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), above the 80 required, and went on to win the election – defeating Bridget Phillipson with 54.3% of the vote.

Labour leadership 2020: Owen was one of 31 Labour MPs who nominated Lisa Nandy for the party’s leadership in early 2020. The election was triggered by the resignation of Jeremy Corbyn following the party’s defeat in the 2019 general election, which resulted in Labour’s fewest seats in the House of Commons since 1935.

Nandy, the MP for Wigan, argued that the party needed a “bridge” to reconnect with traditional working-class voters in northern England. She finished third in the contest with 16.2% of the vote.

Factional identity and party tradition

Trade Union Group: Owen is a member of the Trade Union Group of Labour MPs. This long-standing group, founded in 1926, serves as a link between the Labour party and the trade union movement, aiming to ensure that the voices of working people and their unions are represented in parliament.

Welfare

Welfare ‘reasoned amendment’ (June 2025): Owen was one of the over 120 Labour MPs to sign the reasoned amendment to the government’s flagship welfare bill which aimed to reject the proposed legislation.

The amendment, in the name of senior Labour MP Dame Meg Hillier, objected to the fact that the bill had not been subject to a “formal consultation with disabled people” and that “250,000 people will be pushed into poverty” as a result of it, according to a government impact assessment.

The motion also called on the government to wait for the publication of the review into the Personal Independence Payment (Pip), helmed by minister Sir Stephen Timms, and the independent review, conducted by Sir Charlie Mayfield, into how the employment of disabled people could be boosted.

Welfare vote (July 2025): Owen voted in favour of the government’s flagship welfare bill at second reading. The vote came after ministers agreed to significant concessions to avoid defeat via a mass rebellion of Labour MPs on 1 July 2025.

Assisted dying

Owen supported the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, better known as the assisted dying bill, at both second reading (November 2024) and third reading (June 2025).

Before Politics

Born Sarah Mei Li Owen on 11 January 1983 in Hastings, East Sussex, her mother’s family is of Malaysian Chinese ancestry.

Owen studied at the University of Sussex. Her early career involved working in the public sector as an NHS care worker and in the emergency planning department of the London Fire Brigade.

Moving into political work, she became a political officer for the GMB trade union. She also served as a political adviser to the businessman Lord Sugar and worked on Labour’s national small business policy.

Personal Life

Owen has one daughter, born in February 2020.

Trivia

Owen is the first female MP of Chinese descent, and the first MP of South East Asian descent.