City breaks?
Treasury , Issue 1681

THE City’s finest will be licking their lips at the new Treasury line-up.

Chancellor John Healey’s new number two, chief secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds, was until recently very much one of their own. Before rejoining parliament at the 2024 general election she spent five years as head of public affairs, research and policy at finance industry lobby group TheCityUK.

Its main message was to plug the sector’s economic contribution, play down its harms and argue for friendlier regulation and taxation. With or without the help of his head of public affairs, the body’s chief executive called the calamitous Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget in October 2022 a “bold action to create the conditions for economic growth”. (As interest rates soared and credibility cratered, it did the opposite).

On becoming an MP again – she had been in parliament from 2010 to 2019 – Reynolds became City minister in 2025 and enthusiastically pushed Rachel Reeves’s deregulatory “Leeds reforms”. They would, said Reynolds, “tear down barriers to investment to growing our economy”.

Touchy subject
Healey himself is no stranger to the indulgence of financial services, having served as a loyal Treasury minister under Gordon Brown through five of the “light touch” pre-financial crisis years from 2002 to June 2007.

Discussing a bill to keep exchanges lightly regulated in 2006, Healey stressed the need to “safeguard our successful, risk-based and highly competitive regime of market regulation”, agreeing on the “importance of a light touch”.

Beneath Healey and Reynolds, Lucy Rigby returns to the role of economic secretary, aka City minister, that she occupied for eight months from last September.

During this time she too keenly backed the deregulation agenda, notably reassuring peers on the pro-City Lords financial services regulation committee that she was “committed to ensuring that the secondary growth and competitiveness objectives are comprehensively embedded in the [Bank of England’s] Prudential Regulation Authority and [the] Financial Conduct Authority”.

Unsightly growth
As Healey sets about looking for the money that Andy Burnham has begun promising to spend, not to mention the extra billions of pounds of spending on defence over which Healey resigned from the Starmer government, the temptation to look to the City’s magic growth tree will be strong. Let’s hope Healey remembers what happened just a few weeks after the last time he left the Treasury.

More top stories in the latest issue:

BURNHAM’S NEW ORDURE
The serendipity of politics was apparent among the lower-rank ministerial moves in the early days of Andy Burnham’s new broom.

POLL POSITION
Jacob Rees-Mogg questioned how Andy Burnham can be PM without a mandate – but he said the exact opposite when Liz Truss was in charge.

PUMP ACTION
One of the main tools we have to fight global warming is the tech we use to heat and cool our homes, but the government is drastically wanting here.

HOUSING NEWS
Andy Burnham’s reshuffle sees ministers committed to more social homes embedded in key positions in the new government.

COINCIDENCE CORNERS
MPs galore have been busy returning benefactors’ favours over UAE relations, motor racing and the gambling industry.

WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman boasts that it received and took on more complaints than ever – but it upheld only 1.1 percent of them.