The following report is from the New Statesman today and suggests that the pensions minister is going to take a prominent role in crafting the budget later in the year.

Torsten Bell is to help lead Budget preparations as Rachel Reeves seeks to recover from the most fraught period of her chancellorship. The former Resolution Foundation head, who became pensions minister and parliamentary secretary to the Treasury back in January, will take on additional responsibility for economic policy.

A Reeves ally said that she values Bell as one of Labour’s “sharpest minds” and as someone who has “seen the Budget from both ends: in the room helping to write them and on the Today programme dissecting them”. Bell first entered the Treasury in his mid-20s as a special adviser to Alistair Darling during the 2008 financial crisis before serving as Labour’s director of policy during Ed Miliband’s leadership.

“He was a serious person doing a tough job at a difficult time,” Bell said of Darling in an interview with the New Statesman last year. “He taught me that good politicians are those that understand their role is to take a decision – that is literally the bit of democracy that matters.”

Asked if Bell had, in effect, become deputy chancellor, Treasury sources emphasised that Spencer Livermore, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury and a former No 10 strategy director, would remain Reeves’ closest ministerial colleague but praised Bell as someone with a “lot of respect” among both the department and the wider policy world. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has been tasked with leading the government’s infrastructure strategy and supporting No 10 and Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden on public sector reform….

The reshuffle, which was finalised by Reeves during her recent Cornwall holiday and will be formally announced to the Treasury tomorrow morning, will also see Neil Foster appointed as a special adviser. Foster, a former GMB official who worked for Reeves in opposition, will focus on relations with the parliamentary party and the trade union movement.

When Torsten Bell introduced himself to the PLSA in Edinburgh, he made it clear that he , the Chancellor and the Prime Minister were as one. I wonder whether he has aspirations and if so, where they stop.

A day on we find PP have also read New Statesman!

My nudge came from Tom McPhail – who caught up with me after his tour de force at Pension PlayPen’s Coffee Morning.