Emma Reynolds has breezed into the pension brief with some authority

Delighted to spend my first day meeting other ministerial colleagues and officials in my new role as Pensions Minister in the Department of Work and Pensions. pic.twitter.com/PsCYQa4XpT

— Emma Reynolds for Wycombe 🌹 (@EmmaforWycombe) July 10, 2024

That is, if I may say so, a very confident first statement. We are used to Pensions Ministers having to spend six months getting to grips with their role, but I doubt this will be the case here.

I do not know Emma Reynolds but she is well known within financial services circles as she has been a lobbyist for TheCityUK since losing her parliamentary seat in 2019.

TheCityUK ‘s 2024 “manifesto” called

on the government to prioritise strong collaboration between the financial and related professional services industry, government and regulators to foster an environment that enables our industry to make an even greater contribution in these, and other, important areas.

The manifesto …

 [set] out practical recommendations for the government to deliver our shared objectives and prioritise stability, certainty and predictability in regulation, tax and other key policy areas. Each recommendation sets out what should be delivered during the first 100 days of office to secure the foundations for financing Britain’s future and driving growth over the next five years.

The last five years have seen our Pensions Minister immersed in the financial services’ lobby for what CEO Miles Cedric calls

a new era of policy certainty, stability and predictability – one that the UK urgently needs to boost investment, drive growth and bolster its international competitiveness.

Emma Reynolds

Uniquely, Emma Reynolds holds a ministerial position at both the Treasury and DWP . Yesterday I wrote that this could be fun. Indeed it could be. Laura Trott seems to have come close to running pensions from the Treasury but this “foot in either camp” approach is new. Similarities between Trott and Reynolds are obvious.

Wonderful to be part of this fantastic Treasury team. https://t.co/ccHAkUYxKL

— Emma Reynolds for Wycombe 🌹 (@EmmaforWycombe) July 10, 2024

Emma Reynolds is now MP for Wycombe but was previously MP for Wolverhampton, close to her birthplace in Staffordshire. She has had an entrepreneurial career, setting up a lobby company to help British companies engage with the EU and she appears to have strongly supported remaining in Europe and opposed the right wing policies of Momentum and the Corbyn era.

In 2014, the Guardian offered us some interesting insights into someone who was already a rising star in the Labour Party.

Years after Emma Reynolds won a place at Oxford – unusual enough at her Wolverhampton comprehensive to warrant a picture in the local paper – she contacted her former school offering to give advice to sixth-formers. “They said: ‘No thanks.’ One of the deputy heads at the time felt the other top universities were just as good.”

It niggles with Reynolds, now Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East and recently promoted to shadow housing minister, that her school wasn’t giving its pupils all the best opportunities. It more than niggles that opportunities generally are not shared equally. “You go to Denmark and Sweden and you see a more equal society,” she says. “I think there could be more life chances [here] for people at the bottom, and I don’t want to see such a gap between the richest and poorest.”

Reynolds wants to rein in ruthless landlords and build five new towns to meet demand for homes. “There are big fundamental problems in the housing market and the private rental sector which we can deal with and make a massive difference to people’s lives.”

The only daughter of a self-taught, dyslexic architect and a freelance interpreter (who split up when she was two), Reynolds, 36, has enjoyed a swift rise through the Labour ranks. In seven years she has gone from being a Brussels apparatchik working for the Party of European Socialists, the leftwing group in the European parliament, to being given a place in Ed Miliband’s Tuesday morning shadow cabinet meetings. And having spent some time in between as a special adviser to the then Europe minister Geoff Hoon, she knows what sort of politician she wants to be.

“Some ministers become voice boxes for the civil servants. It shouldn’t be like that. Ministers should lead”.

What is absent from Reynolds’s CV is any engagement with the wider public. She has no ties to the unions or experience such as on the Work and Pensions Committee with how pensions touch those beyond those who deliver them through financial services.

Unsurprisingly she has been welcomed by those she has represented over the past five years .

Now she will have to find ways to harness the latent capacity of the £2.5 trillion in funded retirement plans to deliver long term security for the British people both through providing them with “wage for life” pensions and by using their investments to drive a more productive and sustainable economy.

That store of wealth is spoken for, it is not just an instrument of the Treasury nor is it just a means to meet existing promises. It is money that can both regenerate our economy and pay the bills of those retiring though the rest of the century and beyond. Many of those entering workplace pensions as 22 year olds today will be pensioners in the 22nd century.

I hope that as Labour embarks on its promise to review and reform workplace pensions, the new pensions minister can find this balance and lead discussions so that 21st century pension funds can become again what Frank Field called “Britain’s economic miracle”.