Will Burnham put pensions at the centre of his Autumn budget?

Andy Burnham is exploring holding an expanded Budget this autumn, combining the fiscal statement with a departmental spending review that would set out his political strategy and priorities until the next general election. Treasury insiders say the idea of crunching together the two events — with a potential Budget date in October — is being looked at by officials following preliminary talks in Whitehall with Burnham’s team.

While we will have to wait a few days for Burnham to become Prime Minister, we will have to wait some three months to get this year’s budget, delivered by a new Chancellor with a new set of advisers.

Louse Haigh , the most prominent member of his current advisory team has  been loquacious on an economic reset since leaving parliament in November 2024.  Speaking at the 2025 Compass Conference in London, before writing an essay for the New Statesman in September 2025 on the ‘fiscal straitjacket’ facing the Labour Government and the need to reform the Office for Budget Responsibility and its role in economic policymaking.  She followed it up with a second essay in February 2026 in which she accused the OBR of “throttling” the UK economy by not considering the long term impact of public investment in its economic forecasts.

Andy Burnham is also holding talks with James Purnell, his chief of staff who has a history in pensions. In May 2006, he was promoted to be Minister of State for Pensions in the Department for Work and Pensions, replacing Stephen Timms.

In 2007, he was named Consumer Champion of the Year by Which? magazine for his work on pensions. Which? cited his “commitment to consumers in the development of the national pensions saving scheme”, particularly for listening to stakeholders and for his contributions to the personal accounts for low and middle earners.

He will also be advised by Andy Haldane. In April 2023, Haldane was appointed to HM Treasury‘s Economic Advisory Council. He has been much quoted on this blog for his promotion of pension funds as a means of capitalising the British Economy.

I hope that I am right in thinking that pensions will be central to this budget. We have a number of reasons to suppose it. There is a new consensus developing around the work of Ashok Gupta, Will Hutton and Andy Haldane that pensions should be put to use to restore the British Economy to the growth rates it enjoyed before the economic crash of 2008.

That crash coincided with the retreat of pensions from growth strategies, but growth is now back with large DC schemes embracing the Mansion House compact, more DB schemes using their new found “surpluses” to run on and reject further de-risking. There is the prospect of CDC schemes establishing investment strategies like those that Britain benefited from at the back end of last century.

The prescient consider the chance of  pension funds playing a part in British economic policy again is high.