Hannah Spencer is a plumber, a qualified plasterer, and the woman who has just become parliament’s newest MP in a historic series of firsts.
The 34-year-old is the Green Party’s first northern MP – and its youngest.
She is also the first person to win a parliamentary by-election for the Greens.
And, she is the reason the wider Gorton and Denton area isn’t being represented by a Labour MP for the first time in almost a century.
She told Sky News she knew a victory in the seat “was always possible” and that the win shows “there is an appetite here for change”.
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Plumber-turned-MP
Ms Spencer was born in Bolton and lives in Trafford, and has spent her whole life in Greater Manchester.
She left school at 16 and decided to train to be a plumber, a trade she continued to practice right up to the Gorton and Denton by-election.
Ms Spencer went on to set up her own company, Hannah’s Household Plumbing, and completed training to be a plasterer while campaigning to become an MP.
In her work as a plumber, she retrofitted houses to make them more energy efficient.
She joined the Greens in 2022 and was elected to be a councillor on Trafford Council the following year.
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Ms Spencer then ran to be the mayor of Greater Manchester in the 2024 mayoral election, winning 45,905 votes and finishing in fifth place.
That race was won by Labour candidate and former minister Andy Burnham, who later asked to run in the Gorton and Denton by-election, but was blocked from standing by his party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC).
Ms Spencer endorsed Greens’ leader Zack Polanski in the party’s 2025 leadership election.
Her victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election is the second time she has stood to be an MP.
In 2024, she sought to become the parliamentary representative for Warrington North and finished fifth behind Labour’s Charlotte Nichols.
Instead, Ms Spencer became leader of the Greens on Trafford Council in May 2025 and ran unsuccessfully for a role in the party’s internal elections, before being appointed its spokesperson on migration and refugee support.
Historic by-election win
She was then selected to become the party’s candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, which was called after the incumbent, Andrew Gwynne, stood down for health reasons.
Ms Spencer ran primarily on the grounds of championing wealth equality. Her election leaflets also sought to win swathes of the Muslim vote in the constituency, with some written in Urdu, calling on voters to “punish Labour for Gaza”.
She has campaigned against greyhound racing and has four rescue greyhounds, which she took with her on parts of the campaign trail.
Ms Spencer won the by-election comfortably with 14,980 votes – 40.7% of all ballots – and safely ahead of Reform on 10,578 and Labour on 9,364.
A Labour MP has continuously represented the area in the House of Commons since 1931 – but that era of continuity has now been brought to an end by the Greens’ first by-election winner.
In an emotional victory speech, Ms Spencer said people are being “bled dry” and are “sick of our hard work making other people rich”.
She said: “We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other at all, and we did this with the people who live here, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, just as we have always done in this constituency and in the whole of Greater Manchester, because this is Manchester, and we do things differently here.”
“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” she said. “I’m a plumber, and two weeks ago, during all this, I also qualified as a plasterer, because even in chaos, even under pressure, I get things done.”
She apologised to customers who had made appointments for plumbing jobs, joking: “I think I might have to cancel the work that you had booked in, because I’m heading to parliament.”
