By Civil Service World

24 Sep 2024

Your guide to the department's cast of ministerial characters, and what’s in their in-trays

Rachel Reeves was front and centre of the Labour Party’s general-election campaign, and the new chancellor of the exchequer has remained in the spotlight since its victory on 4 July. 

Almost immediately, Reeves instructed Treasury officials to produce an assessment of the state of public finances. The document was presented to the Commons on 29 July, with the chancellor claiming to have inherited £22bn of departmental overspend from the Tories. Labour has used the funding “black hole” assessment to justify several major spending cuts, including a controversial cut to millions of pensioners’ winter fuel payments. 

With manifesto commitments to fund, and with the remainder of the £22bn gap to bridge, the nation’s first female chancellor is expected to announce a stream of tax changes at her first Budget, scheduled for 30 October. Some – including applying VAT to private school fees and abolishing non-dom tax status – were trailed long before the election. But speculation has been rife that more tax rises are on the horizon. Labour has pledged not to raise taxes on working people, but changes to capital gains tax and inheritance tax could be compliant with that assurance.

As well as immediate funding concerns, the new Treasury team has set to work on their manifesto commitments to create a National Wealth Fund to invest in growth and jobs, and to strengthen the Office for Budget Responsibility. The budget responsibility bill – which will give the OBR new powers and a wider remit – had its first reading in the Commons just two weeks after polling day.

The other pieces of HMT-sponsored legislation set out in the King’s Speech are the National Wealth Fund bill, to put the wealth fund on a permanent statutory footing, the bank resolution (recapitalisation) bill and the Crown Estate bill. 

“Speculation has been rife that more tax rises are  on the horizon”

Reeves is a former Bank of England economist, including a secondment to the British Embassy in Washington DC where she met her now-husband, senior civil servant and former private secretary to Gordon Brown, Nick Joicey. 

Joicey is currently second permanent secretary and chief operating officer at the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs. The couple have two young children.

Reeves was born in south London in 1979. As a schoolgirl she was a junior chess champion and excelled at maths. Ellie Reeves – now minister without portfolio in the Cabinet Office – took part in chess tournaments alongside her elder sister.

Reeves joined the Labour Party aged 17, and has said she knew she would be a Labour supporter from the age of eight. She entered parliament as MP for Leeds West in 2010 – the same year she and Joicey wed. She had two previous attempts to become an MP, both in the Conservative stronghold of Bromley and Chislehurst.

In 2010, then-Labour Party leader Ed Miliband was quick to appoint Reeves to his shadow cabinet, first as shadow work and pensions minister and then as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury in October 2011. She subsequently served as shadow work and pensions secretary. Reeves did not hold a frontbench position during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

She was made shadow minister for the Cabinet Office by Keir Starmer in April 2020, and then shadow chancellor in May 2021. A fellow shadow minister told the BBC earlier this year that Reeves “chews through calls and briefings… I have never, ever, ever, seen her unprepared.”

Reeves has recently championed an approach to governing which she calls “securonomics”. She said this involves prioritising economic strength and resilience in the face of an uncertain future and securing the finances of working people.

A prolific writer, Reeves often pens journal articles and is the author of several books. Last year she admitted she “should have done better” after it emerged that her book, Women Who Made Modern Economics, had entire sentences and paragraphs reproduced from other sources without reference. 

Darren Jones is Reeves’s chief secretary to the Treasury and is often found defending the government during media rounds. In opposition, he chaired parliament’s Business and Trade Committee from 2020 to 2023. During the general-election campaign, he wrote to Treasury perm sec James Bowler complaining about then-PM Rishi Sunak’s claim that “independent Treasury officials” had calculated that Labour policies would result in a £2,000 tax hike for every household.  

Lord Spencer Livermore is financial secretary to the Treasury. He previously served as a special adviser to the Treasury under Gordon Brown and joined Brown in No.10 in 2007 as director of strategy but left the next year. He was made a peer in 2015. 

James Murray is exchequer secretary to the Treasury, with responsibility for the UK tax system. A former Islington councillor, he was London’s deputy mayor for housing from 2016 to 2019, before becoming an MP.

The economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister is Tulip Siddiq. Last year, Siddiq announced a major review of Labour’s financial services policy, which was published in February. 

Emma Reynolds holds a dual role as minister for pensions across both the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions. The decision to make the post a dual appointment is an indication of how seriously Labour intends to take private sector pensions reform, with a pension schemes bill announced in the King’s Speech. DWP is the sponsor department for that legislation.

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