Sir Steve Webb is widely regarded as one of the most effective pensions ministers Britain has ever had. In this first episode of Econ to Icon, Paul Johnson and Michael Kell sit down with the man who drove through the new state pension, helped introduce automatic enrolment, and has spent his post-political career holding the system to account from the outside. Steve is characteristically direct, self-deprecating and thoughtful throughout — on both the substance of pension policy and the more personal questions about career, identity and what it means to do work that matters.

Steve began his working life as an economist at the Institute for Fiscal, before moving into academia and then spending 18 years as a Lib Dem MP. The final five of those years were spent as Pensions Minister in the coalition government of 2010 to 2015, working alongside Iain Duncan Smith and negotiating with a sceptical Treasury to push through reforms that changed retirement income for millions of people.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How Steve got interested in economics and what drew him to pensions specifically
• What it actually takes to get a major policy reform through government — the coalition dynamics, the Treasury negotiations, and the role of personal relationships
• The triple lock, automatic enrolment, and the new state pension: how those reforms happened and why they mattered
• The WASPI issue — and Steve's candid reflection on what he would have done differently
• Losing his seat in 2015 at 49: what it felt like to lose not just a job but an identity, and how he rebuilt
• His post-political career at Royal London and now Lane Clark & Peacock — and how he used his platform to uncover £850 million in underpaid state pensions
• What economics training actually gives you when you're making real decisions under pressure
• What he's learned about career transitions, reinvention, and finding work that genuinely fits

Hosts: Paul Johnson (Frontier Economics / Queen's College Oxford / IFS) and Michael Kell (career coach, michaelkellcoaching.com)

If this conversation got you thinking about your own career — whether you're just starting out, looking to move up, or wondering about a change of direction — Michael offers one-to-one coaching. Find out more at www.michaelkellcoaching.com.

Paul recent books: Sunday Times bestseller Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? and Challenging Inequalities: How We Got Stuck and Where We Go Next

In this short introductory episode, hosts Paul Johnson and Michael Kell introduce Econ to Icon. This is a podcast about people whose careers began in economics and went somewhere remarkable, exploring the substance of what they did and the choices behind how they did it

Paul Johnson has spent nearly four decades working on the economics of public policy — as Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in government, and now at the University of Oxford, where he is head of Queen's College. Paul's interested in how economics shapes the decisions that affect all of us: taxes, pensions, public services, inequality, and how governments respond to crises.

Michael Kell has also spent most of his career as an economist — at the Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, and in consulting. Today he works as a careers coach. He's interested in the people behind the public roles: the turning points, the decisions to leave one path and take another, and what it's actually like to sit in the room when big decisions are made.

In this trailer, Paul and Michael introduce themselves, explain what the podcast is about, and preview the six guests in the first series:

• Steve Webb — the pensions minister who redesigned the UK state pension, and whose legacy we will all live with as we hit retirement age
• Stephanie Flanders — BBC economics editor for a decade, then head of economics at JP Morgan and Bloomberg
• Sharon White — senior civil servant, head of Ofcom, and former chair of the John Lewis Partnership
• Tim Harford — Financial Times columnist, best-selling author, host of Radio 4's More or Less and one of Britain's most trusted communicators of economic ideas
• Amelia Fletcher — competition economist and pop star, founder member of indie bands Talulah Gosh and Heavenly
• Dan Corry — political advisor at the heart of Number 10 during the 2008 financial crisis, and leading figure in measuring the impact of charities