Rachel Reeves is about to announce the creation of a new Council of Economic Advisers to help guide Labour’s first “national mission” – expanding the economy.
Following last week’s landslide general election victory, the UK Chancellor has appointed a leading academic from the London School of Economics (LSE) to chair the council, which will help guide the UK’s growth policies.
John van Reenen, an innovation expert and former Downing Avenue political adviser during Tony Blair’s New Labour government, will chair the body, which is expected to be based in the heart of the Treasury.
There will be three other members on the board from the start, including Ana Valero, a senior political researcher at the London School of Economics who has worked closely with Van Reenen for more than a decade, sources close to the government said.
Valero, a productivity academic, was a member of Jeremy Hunt’s economic advisory council, which the former chancellor appointed 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 senior economists who backed Labour’s plans for the economy in a letter to the Guardian ahead of the general election.
Reeves’ ambition for the council is to get a broad range of views on the economy from leading independent experts, the sources said. The new chancellor has promised to usher in a “decade of national renewal” by laying the foundations for the economy.
Two of Reeves’ closest advisers who worked with the chancellor in Labour’s preparations to form government, Spencer Thompson and Neil Amin Smith, will also be appointed to the new body.
Thompson, a former economist at the Institute for Public Coverage Analysis think tank, has been advising Labour on economic policy since 2020.
Amin Smith played violin in the electric band Clear Bandit before leaving Glastonbury and the Grammy Awards in 2016 to work at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. A Cambridge-educated economist, he joined Labour from the Treasury two years ago.
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In addition to setting up the council, Labour is restructuring the Whitehall machinery to help deliver its governing agenda. This includes setting up “task councils” that are expected to include senior figures from business, economics and other specialist fields.
A Treasury spokesman said the formal appointments had not yet been announced.
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