‘He’s one of the best’: the economist shaping Rachel Reeves’s growth plans
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John Van Reenen believes he can help Labour solve the ‘peculiar British problem’ of chronically weak productivity. The economist John Van Reenen lacks the public status of Gordon Brown’s “two Eds” – Balls and Miliband – who ranged across Whitehall in New Labour’s first term, enforcing the Treasury’s will. But ask today’s Labour apparatchiks about Rachel Reeves’s approach to growth, which she will set out in a speech later this month, and they often point to the chair of her council of economic advisers.
![[Heather Stewart]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2024/11/15/Heather_Stewart,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Currently on leave from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he ran the Centre for Economic Performance, Van Reenen has spent his professional lifetime probing the weak spots of the UK’s economy. Now he is based in an office next to Reeves’s at the Treasury, with his three fellow advisers. One Labour source says they struggle to remember a consequential meeting at which Van Reenen had not been present. Another identifies him as a critical figure in this summer’s spending review.
Tall, affable and whip-smart, he did a four-year stint at MIT in the US – where he remains a “digital fellow”, has published more than 100 academic papers and comes highly recommended by colleagues. “If you were going to choose somebody to advise the chancellor and the Treasury on a strategy for growth, John would almost certainly be your number one candidate,” says Prof Jonathan Portes of King’s College London, who co-authored a paper with Van Reenen in 2012 attacking the coalition government’s austerity policies.
