Chris Webb.

Webb's most significant recent act was breaking with Labour on welfare reform — one of only a minority of Labour MPs to vote against the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill at Second Reading in July 2025, and to support the reasoned amendment seeking to block it. His voting record places him 57 percentage points below the Labour average on welfare reform and 27 points above it on opposing benefit cuts, marking him as one of the more sceptical Labour MPs on the government's disability benefits agenda. On assisted dying, he backed a restrictive amendment that the bill's sponsor warned could harm terminally ill patients — consistent with a voting profile that sits above the party average on assisted-dying restrictions.

Beyond those rebel votes, Webb is a 99.3% party-line voter across his other divisions. His participation rate of 72% sits somewhat below the Commons average, though he has no committee seat to account for. His speeches cluster heavily around economy and jobs (68 contributions), local government, health, cost of living, and social care — a pattern that reflects Blackpool South's acute deprivation. He scores 0% on immigration control votes, despite having campaigned hard locally on the issue, and low on parliamentary scrutiny and local democracy measures — suggesting his constituency work and his voting record do not always point the same direction.

Webb has generated considerable positive local press coverage. He claimed credit for ending the use of the Blackpool Metropole Hotel for asylum seekers after two years of lobbying, organised a jobs fair drawing over 120 employers, and secured a meeting with the Chancellor over South Shore regeneration. Crime coverage, however, averages a sentiment score of zero across seven recent articles — the highest-volume issue in his local press over the past 90 days — suggesting difficult ongoing conditions in the constituency rather than political controversy about Webb personally.