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Chancellor Rachel Reeves is ramping up a policy commitment to economic growth by hiring one of the City of London’s top investment bankers, filling a hole in the Treasury that has been empty since 2022.
Jim O’Neil, a senior investment banker at Bank of America, will on Wednesday be named as second permanent secretary at the Treasury focused on growth.
O’Neil’s appointment comes as ministers finalise an industrial strategy, the centrepiece of the Labour government’s growth strategy, due to be published next month.
“It should have been done sooner,” said one government adviser.
One person close to the appointment said senior Labour figures had been talking to O’Neil since before last July’s election, but there had been much “faffing”.
O’Neil is the first senior City of London figure to hold the second permanent secretary growth role since Sir Charles Roxburgh, now chair of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, left the Treasury in 2022.
The move marks a return to the public sector for O’Neil, who won plaudits for running UK Financial Investments, the body set up after the financial crisis to manage the government’s stakes in bailed-out banks.
The 58-year-old investment banker, who has run Bank of America’s corporate and investment banking operation in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for the past eight years, is due to start at the Treasury in July.
https://www.ft.com/content/54fb61fd-4661-419b-b273-7b07391780c0
