The New Statesman.

Ahead of this autumn's budget, there has been a reshuffle in Rachel Reed's Treasury team.

What's going on and what might it tell us about the trajectory of Britain's finances?

This is the New Statesman podcast. I'm Will Dunn.

And I've returned from the Desert island on which I've been marooned for the last three weeks. I escaped by rolling up

two copies of the New Statesman's summer issue, which is so packed full of great writing that

it only took two copies to form a raft. I waded out of the sea

and came directly here to speak to you, George Eaton, about your exclusive reporting on this

Treasury team reshuffle, which you revealed yesterday that Torson Bell is now going to help Rachel Reeves solve this impossible problem of preparing an autumn budget which will fit the country's finances without taking some of the big steps on tax that they ruled out during the general election campaign. So George, hello.

Hello.

Torsten Bell. Who is he? Where is he from? What does he do? He was previously chief executive

of the Resolution Foundation, right? So he might be familiar to reasons as somebody who's

analyzed previous budgets. Now he's putting one together.

That's right. So I think that's how most listeners will know him. Before he became a Resolution Foundation head in 2015, he was Ed Belaband's Director of Policy.

Before that, actually, whilst still in his mid-20s, entered the Treasury as a special advisor under

Alistair Darling.

And that's very much part of the reason why Reeves' team have brought him in and given him

this responsibility because he was involved in budgets from an early age and then, as you say,

became really quite a national figure in terms of

the man along with the IFS is Paul Johnson who the broadcasters would look to to explain what's what's

really going on with fiscal statements yeah I mean he's somebody that journalists in this area

mostly know as somebody that you could phone up, like, say a bit like Paul Johnson and other people from the IFS who would be able to talk you through fiscal decisions and, you know, their phone would be constantly ringing when budgets were coming out because they have lots of people like us

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