Olivia Blake won Sheffield Hallam for Labour in 2019 with a majority of 712, replacing Jared O'Mara who was subsequently imprisoned for fraud relating to parliamentary expenses claims. She held it in 2024 with 23,875 votes (46.3 percent) and a majority of 8,981, turning a 712-vote survival into a 15.9 percent margin. Sheffield Hallam was Nick Clegg's seat. Then it was O'Mara's disgrace. Now it is Blake's, and she has earned it.

Born March 1990 in Northallerton and educated at Prince Henry's Grammar School and the University of Sheffield, she is the daughter of Judith Blake, Baroness Blake of Leeds and former Leader of Leeds City Council, so politics runs in the family across two cities and two generations. A member of the Socialist Campaign Group, she served as Deputy Leader of Sheffield City Council from 2017 to 2019 with the finance portfolio, where she lifted local procurement by some £80 million a year through ethical contracting, insourced council services, won Living Wage accreditation, and met Michel Barnier in Brussels on post Brexit funding, delivered changes rather than position papers.

In Parliament she served as PPS to Margaret Greenwood and resigned in October 2020 to vote against the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill. She was appointed Shadow Minister for Nature, Water and Flooding in 2021 and Shadow Minister for Climate Change from 2021 to 2022, when she was replaced by Kerry McCarthy.

She is principally known for four policy areas: climate and nature, disability rights, miscarriage policy, and SEND. She chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and co-chairs the APPG on Migration. She currently serves on the Environmental Audit Committee, having previously served on the Public Accounts Committee.

Her climate work includes the Climate and Nature Bill, climate assemblies, housing retrofit advocacy, rewilding, and opposing moorland burning on the edge of the Peak District that borders her constituency. Her constituency casework has included practical accountability on utility failure, such as the Stannington gas outage.

Blake's strengths include transforming a 712 majority into an 8,981 majority over five years, specific deliverable council achievements (£80m procurement, insourcing, Living Wage), two shadow ministerial roles (nature and climate), the SEND APPG chair (one of the most politically charged education issues in the country), Environmental Audit Committee placement, SCG membership providing ideological clarity, and a political mother in the Lords providing institutional understanding. Her weaknesses include no government appointment despite Labour's return to power (her SCG membership and the Overseas Operations resignation likely explain this), no major national legislative achievement bearing her name, and a profile that remains lower than her policy depth warrants. At 36, with a safe seat, a SEND chair, an Environmental Audit placement, and delivered council achievements to point to, she has a platform that most backbenchers would envy. Whether she uses it from the backbenches or eventually returns to the frontbench depends on whether the Labour leadership can find room for an SCG member who resigned on principle once and would probably do it again.