Who are the economic experts appointed to Jeremy Hunt’s new advisory panel?
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.
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”.
The former top adviser to Hammond during his time as chancellor under Theresa May’s
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