Chipping Barnet MP promoted to Treasury junior minister – a chance to demonstrate his commitment to tackling economic insecurity

A little over a year after being elected Labour MP for Chipping Barnet, Dan Tomlinson has been promoted to become a junior minister at the Treasury.

In a reshuffle announced by the Prime Minister on the day MPs returned to Westminster, Mr Tomlinson was appointed Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury.

His promotion from the backbenches to assist in the development of Labour policies to rebuild the economy reflects his previous experience as an economist with think-tanks working on ways to boost living standards and tackle poverty.

For the past year Mr Tomlinson – seen above when campaigning against the closure of High Barnet post office – has been one of Sir Keir Starmer’s backbench champions of economic growth.

His appointment to the ministerial ranks followed in the wake of the promotion of Darren Jones who was moved from the Treasury to a new cabinet post of Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister.

Mr Jones, who was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has been replaced by James Murray, previously the Exchequer Secretary – the post now taken by Mr Tomlinson.

In the general election in July last year, Mr Tomlinson, at the age of 31, defeated the long-standing Conservative MP, Theresa Villiers (who was made a Dame Commander in Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours) and he became Chipping Barnet’s first Labour MP for over 70 years.  

He broke the Conservatives’ hold on what had been one of their safest seats and followed in the steps of an illustrious Labour predecessor Stephen Taylor MP, who won the newly created constituency of Barnet in the 1945 Labour landslide and who became an influential adviser on the creation of the National Health Service.

After studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University, Mr Tomlinson joined the Treasury and moved to the Resolution Foundation in 2015 becoming a senior economist on housing, employment, public spending and living standards.

In 2022, he joined the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as principal policy adviser leading their research and advice on aspects of economic insecurity.

From 2018 to 2022, he served as a councillor in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

After being elected to Westminster, he was listed as one of eight newly-elected Labour MPs who would become advocates on the need to improve social housing – a cause which he has told his constituents was influenced by his own childhood experiences, having grown up on free school meals and having been homeless for a time as a child.

From the start, he indicated that he was determined to use his expertise to work with Keir Starmer, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, to tackle the cost- of-living crisis – and after only 14 months as an MP, he has the chance to put his experience to the test.