Jeremy Hunt has recruited George Osborne’s former chief of staff for a four-person panel of experts designed to show the government welcomes scrutiny of its plans to cut borrowing. Rupert Harrison, an architect behind the former chancellor’s austerity drive, will provide advice on economic policy as Liz Truss’s government battles to repair the damage to its reputation after the mini-budget. The chancellor said Harrison would make an important contribution as he pushed to find billions of pounds in budget savings from tax changes and spending cuts. “Rupert Harrison, in particular, has enormous experience of running the Treasury under George Osborne,” he told the Commons. The panel will also include Philip Hammond’s former top economic adviser, Karen Ward, as well as two former Bank of England economists. The Treasury said further members would be added in due course.
Rupert Harrison Osborne’s chief of staff from 2010-15 is widely regarded as one of the key figures behind the austerity agenda of the 2010s, when successive Conservative-led governments argued they could eliminate budget deficits through billions of pounds in spending cuts, public sector pay freezes, and sweeping reductions to benefits. He left the Treasury to join BlackRock, where he is a fund manager and head of research for a team at the world’s biggest fund manager. An adviser to Osborne and David Cameron since 2006, Harrison had previously been a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Like his former boss, he was a vocal critic of Brexit before the 2016 EU referendum. Osborne tweeted that it was “great to see Rupert Harrison back at the Treasury … and to the rescue”. Karen Ward The former top adviser to Hammond during his time as chancellor under Theresa May’s government, Ward is the chief market strategist for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at JP Morgan Asset Management. Before becoming chair of the chancellor’s council of economic advisers, she worked for a decade at HSBC as a senior economist. She started her career at the Bank of England, providing supporting analysis for its interest rate-setting monetary policy committee (MPC). She was Hammond’s top adviser on economic issues, tax and spending as well as Brexit during a time when the former chancellor pushed for a deal with the EU to leave the bloc and began to pivot from Osborne’s plan to eliminate the budget deficit. The former chancellor made a virtue of budget discipline and set tight tax and spending rules. He launched a stinging attack on Truss last week for having “thrown away” what he called the Conservatives’ reputation for “fiscal discipline and competence”. Gertjan Vlieghe
An independent member of the MPC from 2015 until August last year, the Belgian-born economist joined the US hedge fund Element Capital as its chief economist last year. Vlieghe had been a prominent “dove” during his time on the panel of rate setters, prioritising low interest rates and quantitative easing to support the economy and employment during the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. Before that he was a senior economist at the hedge fund Brevan Howard, and has also worked for Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan. He also worked at the Bank in the early 2000s as an economic assistant to the then governor, Mervyn King. Sushil Wadhwani
An independent economist on the Bank’s MPC during the earlier years of its formation between 1999 and 2002, he left to launch his own investment firm, Wadhwani Asset Management, where he is chief executive. A free thinker who had run-ins with the Bank’s senior leadership, Wadhwani was a proponent of lower interest rates to support the economy during his time at Threadneedle Street. He has also held roles at Tudor Investment Corporation, one of the pioneers of the hedge fund industry, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs. Wadhwani was openly critical of the government after the mini-budget, warning that the public finances were “simply not sustainable”. Criticising a reliance on control of public spending, he added: “Most are rightly sceptical of promises to cut public spending in three years’ time.”