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New MPC Appointments

Following Mervyn King’s comments about the slowness of the Treasury’s appointment of two new MPC (Monetary Policy Committee) members, Gordon Brown has now announced who those two members will be, and when they are due to join the committee officially.

The timings of when the new members are due to join mean that the MPC will continue to be running at less than its full complement of decision makers until October of this year. The committee will continue to be run with just seven members until September, which is when Timothy Besley is to join them, with Andrew Sentence coming along the following month.

The whole appointment process has come under fire from a number of politicians, who have criticised the closed nature of the selection process, and suggestions that the Bank’s independence has been compromised by the fact that it is ultimately down to the Chancellor to decide who sits on the committee.

Timothy Besley, who will be the first to join of the two new appointments, comes from a background in the London School of Economics, where he is currently a professor. Besley is certainly an accomplished economist, with a wealth of research papers behind him, and who last year won the Yrjo Jahnsson Award – the most highly regarded award in European economics. The London School of Economics is not an unusual place for MPC members to hail from, with four members past and present having come from there.

Andrew Sentence in contrast comes from the private sector, he was head of economic policy at the CBI between 1986 and 1988 and its director of economic affairs until 1993. He joined BA as head of environmental affairs in 2002 and is their chief economist.

How these two new additions will affect the voting of the MPC is a source of much discussion in economic circles at present.