Laura Coryton MBE born in Shoreham, East Sussex (born 1993)[1] is a British campaigner, feminist activist and author. She is the founder of Stop Taxing Periods, the campaign to abolish the tampon tax in the United Kingdom and make menstrual products exempt from VAT. Coryton's online petition successfully lobbied the UK Parliament into establishing the Tampon Tax Fund in 2016, through which almost £100m was donated to female-focused charities. Her campaign succeeded in 2021 when the tax on all period products was axed.
Laura also runs the Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) social enterprise Sex Ed Matters, dedicated to making quality and confidence-building sex education accessible to everyone, for which she won UKRI's Young Innovator Award 2023 and Women in Innovation Award 2024.
She began her career in frontline politics in 2024 when she stood as the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park.
Coryton's first book Speak Up!, a campaign guide for rebel girls, was published by Harper Collins UK in 2019, the USA in 2022 and has been translated into French.
For her work, she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to Charitable Campaigning.[2] Coryton also joined the Obama Foundation as a European Leader in 2022, joined the Department for Education's Period Poverty Taskforce in 2020, and was named one of The Observer's and Nesta's 2016 New Radicals.[3][4] In December 2016, the BBC included her in their list of Five women who aren’t on Wikipedia but should be.[5]
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