[4] Field was educated at St Clement Danes Grammar School, at that time in Hammersmith, before studying Economics at the University of Hull.

[8] Field served as a Labour councillor for Turnham Green on Hounslow London Borough Council from 1964 until 1968, when he lost his seat.

[10] Field unsuccessfully contested the constituency of South Buckinghamshire at the 1966 general election, where he was defeated by the sitting Conservative MP Ronald Bell.

[11] He was selected to contest the safe Labour seat of Birkenhead at the 1979 general election on the retirement of the sitting MP Edmund Dell.

[12] In Parliament, Field was made a member of the Opposition frontbench by the Labour leader Michael Foot as a spokesman on Education in 1980, but was dropped a year later.

[14] Following the 1997 election, with Labour now in power, Field joined the government led by Tony Blair as its Minister for Welfare Reform, working in the Department of Social Security (DSS).

Field thought that the state should play only a small direct role in the provision of welfare and he disliked means-testing and non-contributory entitlement to benefits, which he believed should only be received after claimants had joined Continental-style social insurance schemes or mutual organisations such as friendly societies.

[17]The following year, Downing Street briefed the press that "harsh and authoritarian" measures were in store for welfare recipients[18] and plans were made to abolish the DSS.

[19]The welfare reform most closely associated with Blair was not introduced for a further three years: the replacement of Incapacity Benefit (IB) by Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

[19] The think-tank Reform, on whose advisory board Field used to sit, said in its 2016 report on changes to out-of-work sickness benefits that ESA had "replicated many of the problems of IB" and had therefore "failed to achieve its objective".

[20] After leaving ministerial office, Field continued with his duties as an MP and joined the Ecclesiastical and the Public Accounts Select Committees in the House of Commons.

From the backbenches, he was a vocal critic of the government, criticising in 1999 the new Working Families Tax Credit as an approach which could not survive in the long term,[21] and voting against foundation hospitals in November 2003.

In May 2008, he was a significant critic of the abolition of the 10p tax rate[22] and this led to Field describing Prime Minister Gordon Brown as "unhappy inside his own body".

In June 2010 he was appointed by David Cameron's coalition government to head an independent review into poverty,[28] which proposed adopting a new measure centred around life-chance indicators and increasing funding for early years education.

[32] In October 2013, along with Laura Sandys, Field established the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hunger and Food Poverty, which he went on to chair.

[33][34] Field became the chair of trustees of Feeding Britain, a charitable organisation set up in October 2015 to implement the recommendations made by the APPG.

[39] In June 2016, Field wrote in The Guardian that he supported Brexit, emphasising the need to control immigration due to it creating excessive demands on public services, roads and housing stock.

He argued the EU model suited big businesses who wanted cheap labour, and supported agricultural interests creating high prices for food, rather than families.

Field spoke of how he had talked a man out of suicide and how one claimant felt "lucky" his family was invited to eat food leftovers from a funeral.

[42] On 17 July 2018, a vote was held on a rebel amendment to a trade bill, which aimed to force the British government to join a customs union with the EU in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Field, Kate Hoey, John Mann and Graham Stringer were the only Labour MPs to oppose the amendment, which was lost by 307 votes to 301.

In March 2015, Field was awarded the Grassroot Diplomat initiative honour for the co-founding of environmental organisation Cool Earth, a charity that works alongside indigenous villages to halt rainforest destruction as a bottom-up solution to an ageing problem.

[73] Field supported the return of national service to tackle growing unemployment and instil "a sense of order and patriotism" in Britain's young men and women.

[www.brokenrites.org] Field's political and religious views were most clearly expressed in his book Neighbours From Hell where he discusses what might replace the "largely beneficial effect" of evangelical Christianity.

[89] In a 2006 article in The Observer, the critic Jay Rayner noted that Field's unmarried status had led him to describe himself as "incomplete" but that those in his social circle suggested he enjoyed "a full life outside politics".