Week in Business
Week in Business sees City AM's Editor-in-Chief Christian May break down the top stories of the week in the UK.
Week in Business
Who is - and isn't - advising Andy Burnham on the economy
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Andy Burnham’s allies boasted that highly-regarded economists had been lured as advisers. City AM Editor in Chief Christian May and Economics and Politics Reporter Mauricio Alencar discuss the non-appointments of some of Britain’s best economists – and what the Prime Minister and Chancellor’s new teams look like.
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Welcome to the Week in Business, and this week we're gonna spend a little bit of time trying to get to grips with the idea of who is advising Andy Burnham on the economy. And it matters because Andy Burnham says he wants to impose the biggest economic shake-up this country has seen for 40 years. When he says he wants to tear down four decades of neoliberalism, it's worth wondering who is he discussing this with? Who has he been discussing it with? Is it just something that he wakes up thinking about in the morning or or goes to bed worrying about at night? Because it's not immediately clear quite who it is he's gonna bring into his economic team, to the treasury, beyond the obvious appointments that we've seen, that are gonna sort of empower that mission. You would think that he would say, I'm gonna impose the biggest economic shake-up on this country for 40 years, and say, and here's the team, here are the people that have been thinking about this with me and working on this with me for the last few years or even the last few months would be nice. And we got a little tease of some big economic advisors who were meant to be coming into Downing Street with him, and we looked very closely at the reshuffle and who's in and who's out, and what's happened to his special advisors, and there's no indication in any of that that there's any kind of dramatic economic change coming. Now, it might be that he's going to just empower this team that he's assembled and say, now go and do this, but it you think it would make more sense to do it the other way around, to to build the team specifically for the scale of the economic project that he wants to do. So it was so interesting, we had no choice but to put uh a couple of our top people on the case, resulting in a 2,000-word feature at City AM this week, which has been extremely well read, asking exactly who Andy Burnham's economic advisers are and who are they not, and what can we read into all of that? Well, I'm going to ask one of the authors of that piece, Maurizio, is our political and economics reporter. By the way, combining the politics and economics beat in a single reporter, Good Morning Maurizio. Good morning. Uh is a CTAM uh initiative, um, and I think it's extremely successful. And this feature that you did with Ali Lyon, our chief reporter, is a very good example of quite how well that works. So, you spoke to an awful lot of people, you looked at all the different people movements, you tried to connect the dots. Start by telling us what happened to the big three brains that we were all told are advising Andy Burnham while Kirst Armer was still in number 10, but we knew Burnham was going to take over, and we were told, look at these big three brains he's got with him. Who were they?
SPEAKER_01The day before the Maker Pitfield by-election coordinated series of reports said Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England Deputy Governor, Richard Hughes, the former OBR chair, who was ousted over leaking the budget, and finally we also had Jim O'Neill, who was a Treasury Minister under the Conservatives who led that sort of northern powerhouse, allowed Burnham to be the mayor as he was.
SPEAKER_00And that reassured the city, it reassured people that he wasn't some sort of kamikaze Corbonite. So have these three big brains all now got a desk in Downing Street?
SPEAKER_01No, is a is a straightforward answer there. But it's a little bit more context around that. Is Jim O'Neill, we understand, is having ongoing conversations, but effectively these advisers were never appointed and some of them not handed any official role. Um so it is a slightly bizarre thing to do to brief out that you are appointing three economists and not appoint any at all. So does he have a chief economic advisor? He does not. Keir Starmer used to have um Minus Shafiq, also a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. It seems that she's leaving. Number 10 officials didn't actually deny the fact that she was leaving.
SPEAKER_00Um no indication as to who the successor might be.
SPEAKER_01Could be Jim O'Neill. We had one we we know of one um advisor who was under Rachel Reeves, one of the top paid, and actually he was a violinist for their um band Clean Bandit. Um famous for the song Rather Be.
SPEAKER_00I'm afraid that's all going over my head. Stick to the Westminster machinery for me.
SPEAKER_01He was an economist under um Rachel Reeves, and he's been kept on and he's working in number 10.
SPEAKER_00Bit of continuity there. And there's a little bit of continuity in some of the other sort of business-focused advisors in number 10. Um, and of course, there's John Healy, the Chancellor, the Chancellor that offends nobody. Yes. Um, okay, so this we don't know who the chief economic advisor is going to be. The big three economic brains that were trailed as a great act of kind of reassuring the markets are actually nowhere to be seen, though one of them might go in. Um do we have an investment minister?
SPEAKER_01We do not have an investment minister. Portfolios are still being managed according to the treasury. Um they're still coming to a conclusion on that. Um, we had the the David Pitt Watson who I think some city um types might know who he is because he's written books on pensions and financial regulation. He's a minister in the Treasury. We obviously have the city minister again, Lucy Rugby, is back.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um that ministerial reshuffle, some new faces, some returning, some some people who haven't really moved. So I mean, there are obviously some exceptionally capable and bright uh individuals in number 10 and number 11, um, both ministerially and as advisors. But my my my point, I suppose, was it doesn't feel like it's the kind of conclusion, this great unveiling of this is the team who who are going to take my economic vision and run with it. So the first sense we might get of that is of course the budget.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean you're not alone in thinking that either. I've had tech saying actually, I don't know why Burnham's not actually appointed more economic advisors, and with that budget already being set for the end of October, those preparations are well underway. We've had a lot of different economic announcements around energy bills and business rates or pubs. Um, all of that is gonna rack up. John Healy obviously resigned as defence secretary over not spending more money on the fence. Where's that money gonna come from? Is it more taxes? Which taxes, what tax reform will actually come out in the next two months? So um so while while while the sort of advisory team is sort of touch and go, those budget preparations are definitely well underway, and that's a very short period of time to do something really radical, which Burnham has been trading for a number of months now.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, we'll keep a close eye on it. Mauricio, thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining me on the weekend business. Uh, see you all next week.