Rachel Jane Reeves was born on February 13th 1979 in Lewisham, southeast London. She comes from a public service background; her father was a teacher and her mother worked as a social worker.

Rachel attended Cator Park School for Girls in Bromley (a comprehensive which became Harris Girls’ Academy, Bromley, in 2011). While at secondary school she won a British Under-14 girls chess championship title in a tournament organised by the now-defunct British Women’s Chess Association.

After sitting A-levels in politics, economics, mathematics and further mathematics, she read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where she achieved a 2:1. She then obtained a Master of Science degree in economics from the London School of Economics.

Reeves’s first job after leaving university was with the Bank of England. She moved to Leeds in 2006 to work as an analyst for the retail arm of HBOS.

Reeves cites the influence of her father on her and her sister Ellie Reeves MP’s socially democratic politics. When she was eight, her father, Graham, pointed out the then Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock on television and “told us that was who we voted for.” Reeves says she and her sister have “both known we were Labour since then”. She joined the Labour Party at the age of 16.

Her first venture into national politics was when she stood as the Labour Party parliamentary candidate in the Conservative safe seat of Bromley and Chislehurst at the 2005 General Election, where she finished second behind the sitting MP Eric Forth. While a long way from her residential home in Leeds, it was on the doorstep of her family home.

Following Forth’s death in 2006, she contested the subsequent by-election and crashed into fourth place. Labour’s support fell from 10,241 votes to a humiliating 1,925. The result was the worst performance for a governing party since 1991.

At the 2010 General Election, Rachel stood as a Labour candidate for Leeds West. She won at the first attempt and has comfortably held that seat ever since, albeit as a result of the 2023 boundary changes, she now represents Leeds West and Pudsey.

Her first victory was in the aftermath of the ‘banking crash’ of 2008. Rachel was quoted at the time as saying, “Moving from banking, I am one of the few people entering politics to be going to a more popular profession.”

Westminster

Until the 2024 General Election, Rachel has spent her entire Westminster career on the opposition benches. Her rise through the party ranks has been rapid and consistent.

She was appointed to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee, then as Shadow Pensions Minister in October 2010. She was promoted to the post of Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury in October 2011.

Appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Work & Pensions in 2013, Rachel proposed that anyone unemployed for two years, or one year if under 25 years old, would be required to take a guaranteed job or lose access to benefits, in flat contradiction to Labour policy, and very much in line with Conservative policy.

She doubled down on this stating that Labour would be “tougher” than the Conservative Party in cutting the benefits bill. She caused further controversy in early 2015 by stating, “We [Labour] don’t want to be seen as, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work”.

When Sir Keir Starmer became Labour leader in 2020, Rachel was appointed as Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for Labour’s response to Brexit and shadowing Michael Gove.

She was appointed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in a shadow cabinet reshuffle in May 2021, replacing Anneliese Dodds.

The new Chancellor

Without offering specific plans or targets for the economy, what the UK can expect from Rachel Reeves as Chancellor of the Exchequer can mostly be gleaned from her speeches and interviews she undertook while shadow Chancellor.

In December 2021, Rachel said she would support a 2p cut to the Income Tax basic rate if the Conservatives proposed that. She opposed the planned 1.2% rise in National Insurance rates. She said Labour planned to replace business rates with a new system that charged shops fairly compared to larger online businesses.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Rachel said a Labour government under Keir Starmer would be “pro-business and committed to fiscal discipline.”

She pointed out that Britain had seen a Japanese-style ‘Lost Decades’ of growth, which she believed a Labour government would reverse through following fiscal rules and eliminating borrowing for day-to-day spending, with no unfunded election spending commitments. This, she said, would enable government capital spending, above the current 3% of GDP per year limit, to promote growth. Labour would be both “pro-worker and pro-business.”

Ironically for a Labour administration, this sounds more like One Nation Conservatism, and much closer to the fiscal policies of the likes of John Major than those of Kwasi Kwarteng, Rishi Sunak and Nadim Zahawi.

While these policy statements come to the dismay of many – if not most – Labour Party members, Rachel herself has pointed out that the UK has been left in such an economic mess that it will take at least one Parliament to right the ship, and that the economy can’t afford for it to be ideologically radical, even if she was minded to be. What UK commerce is looking for, at the very least, is some notion of stability and clarity in the new government’s economic policies.

She has inherited a UK economy which has, in the past few years, experienced the ongoing after-effects of Brexit (something she intends to mitigate rather than reverse), the global thump of the Covid pandemic, a war in Ukraine which has affected European economies, especially in the supply of energy, with countries recovering with varying degrees of success - and failure.

Plus, there was the economic wrecking ball of a Prime Minister whose tenure was famously outlasted by an iceberg lettuce. Despite these national and international drawbacks, the economy - or at least the perception of it - has been one of money flow only heading one way, and of poor figures for growth.

The old, ongoing in-joke – dating back to the early 1960s – of the outgoing Treasury administration leaving a note for the incoming administration that, “there’s no money left” must never have felt so sore.

In office

The Charter for Budget Responsibility, overseen by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) requires the Chancellor, under normal circumstances, to give the OBR at least ten weeks’ notice of a fiscal event and formally commission a forecast. It is up to the Chancellor to decide on the date.

Despite Liberal Democrats’ calls for an ‘Emergency Budget’ on the subject of health care, it’s highly improbable that she will deliver a financial statement until September, at the earliest; and more likely to be October, after the party conference season has finished.

One fight she will have coming up on the horizon – as has been highlighted in this magazine – is the removal of the VAT exemption on private schools’ fees. Given the timing of her first Budget – together with the issues of poor administration of SEN children, as highlighted in the recent article in Dynamic Magazine – it’s unlikely this will be brought into effect before September 2025.

It will be a first test of her resolve to mitigate the potential political and social damage, especially with Bridget Phillipson, the new Education Secretary, who will need to ascertain how this policy will also affect state schools. That said, given the huge majority Labour has, the policy will almost certainly go through.

Despite elements of the press fearmongering a return to strikes and excessive workers’ rights – something she is steadfastly against - this is by no means a ‘hard-left’ Chancellor, who is not operating in a ‘hard-left’ administration. If nothing else, the electorate would not have allowed that kind of politics such a thumping majority, irrespective of what kind of chaos it was replacing.

However, as the balance of Rachel’s fiscal policies become clearer in the coming weeks, months and years, Platinum and Dynamic, through their excellent thought-leadership contributors, will continue to offer expert opinion and advice to the new administration’s policies as and when they take effect.