Theresa Stewart: First female leader of Birmingham City Council and fierce campaigner for those most in need

Theresa Stewart, who has died aged 90, was the first, and so far the only, female leader of Birmingham City Council, the largest metropolitan authority in Europe. Throughout her long career in local government she campaigned consistently on behalf of those who needed extra help in life. She once said that her role as a councillor was “doing for poor people what lawyers do for rich people”.

As one of the founders of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (then known as the Birmingham Pregnancy Advisory Service) in 1968, Stewart ensured that women were able to control their fertility, despite efforts by some to deny them this right. Although the Abortion Act had legalised the termination of pregnancies, women were still seeing resistance from hospitals and doctors or finding that the high cost made it impossible.

Stewart saw the “right to choose” as a political issue and strove to ensure access to doctors who could help women to make the choice. The BPAS charity – initially at its clinic in Birmingham and later in Brighton and London – offered women a low-cost alternative to the NHS when it was most needed.

Clare Murphy, the chief executive of the BPAS, said “We owe Theresa’s generation a huge debt of gratitude. Their advocacy and action made space for women to live and work safely with the assurance that they could make decisions whether and when to have children. They were determined and feisty – and that is a tradition we, at BPAS, hope to continue.”

Stewart had also been a supporter of Birmingham’s gay community in the early 1970s, assisting groups to secure funding at a time when other councillors were reluctant to help. And in advocating for single parents and women in abusive relationships, Stewart campaigned to ensure that the family allowance (now child benefit) was paid directly to the mother.

Theresa Raisman was born in 1930 in Leeds, the daughter of Ray and John Raisman, a solicitor. When her father became bankrupt and left home, she was brought up by her mother amongst the city’s Jewish community.

She was educated at Allerton High School and won a scholarship to study mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford University. It was at Oxford that she met John Stewart, whom she married in 1953. After spells in Edinburgh, London and Doncaster, following John’s work with the National Coal Board around the country, the couple settled in Birmingham in 1966.

Stewart was first elected as a Labour councillor for the Billesley ward in southern Birmingham in 1970 and went on to serve her constituents for more than three decades. A woman of principle, in 1991 she and 19 other councillors said that they would rather lose the whip than approve proposed cuts to a children’s home. Having voted on principle, she and her colleagues were briefly suspended from the Labour Group.

In 1993 Stewart was elected leader of Birmingham City Council, a position she held for the next six years. Under her leadership the council shifted its focus from spending on major infrastructure projects towards social services, especially in health and education.

Birmingham hosted the G8 summit in 1998, bringing world leaders including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to the city. But Stewart was prouder still of meeting Nelson Mandela during his 1993 visit, a photograph of which took pride of place on her mantelpiece. Although, as her son Henry noted, “far more important to her than that was her contribution to the people of Birmingham”.

Following a year as lord mayor of the city in 2000, she had continued to support Labour in later life, including, at the age of 86, door-to-door leafletting for the party in the run-up to the 2017 general election.

Ian Ward, the current leader of Birmingham City Council, said she was “an amazing, inspirational and compassionate woman, who made a huge difference” to the city. Harriet Harman MP described her in tribute as “a pioneer for women’s equality and women’s representation, a true sister to me and others. A truly exceptional woman.”

She is survived by her husband, Professor John Stewart, and their four children.

Theresa Stewart, politician and campaigner, born 24 August 1930, died 11 November 2020