Dan Corry: Power, Influence and the Art of Getting Things Done

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Dan Corry: Power, Influence and the Art of Getting Things Done

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Dan Corry has spent most of his career close to the centre of British economic policy-making — but largely out of public view. As a civil servant, a think-tank economist, a special advisor across multiple government departments, and ultimately as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors at the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, he has been one of the more quietly influential figures in recent British economic history. In this episode he talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about how policy actually gets made, what influence looks like when it doesn't come with a public profile, and what he found when he eventually left government for the charity sector. The career in brief Dan grew up in Barnes, south-west London, in a Labour-supporting household that was, he notes, probably the only one in the area with a Labour poster in the window. He read PPE at Oxford intending to focus on politics and philosophy, but gradually moved toward economics. After graduating he joined the Government Economic Service, working first at the Department of Employment and then at the Treasury during the Thatcher years — an interesting position, as he puts it, for someone whose sympathies lay firmly elsewhere. He left the civil service in 1989 to join the Labour Party's newly created Economic Secretariat, working through the years of opposition, then spent time at the Institute for Public Policy Research before returning to government as a special advisor in 1997. He worked across the Department of Trade and Industry, Number 10, and the Treasury — including at the heart of the response to the 2008 financial crisis — before moving in 2010 to lead the charity New Philanthropy Capital, where he spent over a decade. He remains involved in the charity sector and continues to advise government, most recently conducting a review of environmental regulation for DEFRA. On working for a government you disagreed with Dan is thoughtful about his years as a civil servant under Thatcher. He didn't experience it as a crisis of conscience — the civil service's job is to serve the elected government, and he did it — but he is honest that the atmosphere was slightly strange, peopled largely by those who had stayed in the public sector precisely because they believed in it, while those more sympathetic to the free market had left for the City. He also quietly got involved in the Labour Economic Strategies Group, a network of centre-left economists trying to develop credible policy thinking outside the party machinery. On the 1992 shadow budget One of the episode's most historically resonant passages covers Dan's involvement in John Smith's shadow budget ahead of the 1992 election — the document that has since become totemic in Labour folklore as a possible contributor to the party's defeat. Dan is proud that the numbers were never successfully challenged. But he reflects honestly on what went wrong politically: Labour had committed to significant increases in pensions and child benefit, had to find the money somewhere, and the National Insurance changes that resulted allowed the Conservatives to construct their "Labour will put up taxes by £1,000 per household" attack — which they ran regardless of what Labour actually said. The shadow budget was designed to reassure; it ended up providing ammunition. He draws an explicit line from that experience to Labour's self-imposed tax constraints in 2024. On life as a special advisor Dan gives one of the clearest accounts in the series of what special advisors actually do — and don't do. They are political appointees who can do things civil servants cannot: liaise across departments, push back on proposals that officials are recycling from a previous minister, and act as a conduit between the Secretary of State and the political world beyond the department. But the job is brutal in one specific way: your employment ends the moment your minister leaves. Dan had three Secretaries of State at the DTI — Margaret Beckett, Peter Mandelson, Steven Byers — and stayed through all three, which he describes as unusual. Watching civil servants test new ministers with proposals their predecessors had rejected was one of the more instructive lessons in how departments actually work. On the minimum wage Dan is rightly proud of his role in the introduction of the minimum wage — work that began during his time at the Department of Employment, continued through his years at IPPR, and came to fruition when Labour won in 1997. He traces the intellectual shift clearly: the standard civil service answer when he started had been that a minimum wage would destroy jobs, based on simple supply and demand. But American academic work — David Card and others — was beginning to show that in labour markets with monopsony characteristics, the opposite could be true. He credits the Low Pay Commission model — bringing together the CBI, TUC, small business representatives and academics to reach a ...

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