Rachel Reeves is poised to announce the creation of a new council of economic advisers to help guide Labour’s number one “national mission” of expanding the economy.
After last week’s general election landslide, the chancellor of the exchequer has lined up the appointment of a leading academic from the London School of Economics (LSE) to chair the council, which will help to inform the government’s growth policies.
John Van Reenen, an innovation expert and former Downing Street policy adviser under Tony Blair’s New Labour government, will head the body, which is expected to sit within the heart of the Treasury.
Sources close to the government said there would be three other members of the council from the outset, including Anna Valero, a senior policy fellow at the LSE who has worked closely with Van Reenen for more than a decade.
An academic with a focus on productivity, Valero was a member of Jeremy Hunt’s economic advisory council, convened by the former chancellor in the wake of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in an attempt to rebuild confidence in financial markets. Hunt quietly disbanded the council last year.
Valero was among a group of leading economists to endorse Labour’s plans for the economy in a letter to the Guardian before the general election.
Reeves’s ambition for the council is to draw a wide range of perspectives on the economy from leading independent experts, the sources said. The new chancellor has promised to usher in a “decade of national renewal” by fixing the foundations of the economy.
Two of Reeves’s closest advisers who worked with the chancellor on Labour’s preparations for government, Spencer Thompson and Neil Amin-Smith, will also be appointed to the new body.
Thompson, a former economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank, has advised Labour on economic policy since 2020.
Amin-Smith was the violin player in the electropop band Clean Bandit before leaving behind Glastonbury and Grammy awards in 2016 for a career at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. A Cambridge-educated economist, he joined Labour from the Treasury two years ago.
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As well as creating the council, Labour is reshaping the machinery of Whitehall to help deliver its agenda for government. This includes the formation of “mission delivery boards”, which are expected to include senior figures from the worlds of business and economics, and other specialist fields.
A Treasury spokesperson said formal appointments were yet to be announced.
