Who is Dan Tomlinson, the new Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury?

While a full-scale reshuffle of the government’s ministerial ranks has been ruled out by Number 10 for this week, Keir Starmer has brought in one of the new intake as a minister amid a shake-up of his top aides.

With Darren Jones being elevated to Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and James Murray being moved into his previous role as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Chipping Barnet MP Dan Tomlinson has become a junior minister, being appointed as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury.

Tomlinson, elected last year after defeating Theresa Villiers, has been described as among the “most vociferous housing campaigners from the new intake” of Labour MPs – and is affiliated with the Labour Growth Group, the Get Britain Working Group, the Living Standards Coalition and Labour Yimby, which welcomed his appointment and called him “the perfect man for the job”.

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Before entering Parliament, Tomlinson previously worked for the Treasury and as a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, a think tank dedicated to improving standards of living for those on low and middle incomes. He also worked at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity dedicated to tackling poverty.

In an article he wrote for the website OnLondon shortly after his election last year, Tomlinson opened up about his own acute experience of the housing crisis.

He wrote: “I grew up on free school meals and was homeless for a time as a child. I know the critical importance of social housing for families in need.

“Some have said that Labour’s deep in-roads into Conservative suburban and rural Britain mean that newly-elected MPs will baulk at the prospect of planning reform. These doomsters couldn’t be more wrong. I and my new colleagues are in politics to fix problems, not to shy away from them. This new generation of MPs hasn’t just read about the housing crisis in newspapers, it has lived it.

“You don’t need to tell me about the toll that living in emergency and temporary accommodation places on families – I’ve been through that as a child. Or that the most common living arrangement today for people in their early 30s is living with their parents – that was me until last year as I saved for a deposit in London via living with my in-laws.”

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