Lucy Rigby: talent, ambition and making finance fairer
Lucy Rigby MP says she has always taken life seriously. Perhaps that helps explain a political career that seems to be moving at breakneck speed. The Economic Secretary to the Treasury sat down with Women in Westminster to talk about talent, ambition and why financial services need to work for everyone
Lucy Rigby has an admission to make.
“I’m quite a serious person,” she tells Women in Westminster during our conversation. “Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy a laugh, but I am. I think I’ve always taken life quite seriously.”
For anyone who has closely followed Rigby’s first two years in Parliament, this statement is unlikely to come as a total surprise. The rapidity of her rise must have left little time for distractions.
Elected as Labour MP for Northampton North in 2024, Rigby was quickly appointed to the Treasury Select Committee. She went on to serve as a parliamentary private secretary at the Ministry of Justice before being appointed solicitor general in December 2024. Nine months later, she moved to the Treasury as economic secretary and city minister. She was promoted again to chief secretary in 2026, before returning to her former role as Economic Secretary two months later as part of Andy Burnham’s frontbench.
Before entering the Commons, Rigby worked as a solicitor. She joined Parliament alongside a large intake of new Labour MPs, something that she says helped ease what can often be a challenging transition.
When asked how it felt to enter Parliament, Rigby remembers that amid all of the grandeur and tradition of her new workplace, it was a much smaller moment when the privilege and responsibility of representing her constituents really struck home.
“They said to me, ‘Here’s your coat peg,’ and it had Northampton North over it,” she recalls. “And for some reason, when I hung my stuff on that coat peg, that funny little act just really brought it home for me that I am the representative of Northampton North in Parliament.”
Rigby had little time to find her feet on the backbenches. By the end of the year, she was solicitor general. Her subsequent move to become chief secretary to the Treasury made her the first member of the 2024 intake to attend Cabinet.
Seriousness may be one element that helps explain Rigby's progression, but it only goes so far. Indeed, when discussing the politicians she herself admires, Rigby makes an interesting observation about the way successful women are often described. Reducing their achievements to qualities such as “resilience” or “hard work,” she suggests, can obscure the more obvious explanation of talent.
She cites Labour pioneers such as Barbara Castle and Margaret Bondfield alongside figures like Madeleine Albright and Janet Yellen.
“Each of those women was genuinely brilliant,” she tells us. “Too often, I think we say men are brilliant and women ‘work very hard’ or ‘they’re very resilient.’ Each of those women was particularly talented and really quite incredible, as well as being stock full of courage and able to withstand things.”
Political talent also appears to be a quality that Rigby herself has in abundance. But it is allied to a drive to reach the next milestone and a relentless curiosity about what the future might look like.
“Because I was passionate about the things I was passionate about at each step of the way, I’ve just always been really keen to get to the next bit,” she tells us.
The “bit” she is currently focused on is Economic Secretary to the Treasury and City Minister. Rigby’s wide-ranging responsibilities include financial services, a sector she argues is often wrongly perceived only through the prism of the City of London. Rigby points to major clusters in Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff, as well as the role played by mutuals and credit unions in communities across the country.
“There is no route to good growth in every postcode that doesn’t involve a thriving financial services sector,” she says. “It’s how small businesses in every corner of the country will be able to expand and create jobs and grow local economies.”
And, as she points out, ultimately it is people as well as businesses that benefit from the UK’s world-leading financial services sector.
“I think of financial services as the ecosystem that supports the entirety of the real economy and then allows us as individuals to live our lives,” she says. “So, things like bank accounts, being able to put some money to one side, saving for your pension. All of these things are how our lives work.”
Because financial services provide the infrastructure for everyday life, Rigby argues that access is an issue of fairness as much as economics. She is at her most passionate when discussing financial inclusion and warns it cannot be treated as a worthy add-on.
“People can occasionally think about financial inclusion as being some kind of act of charity that kind of happens over here while the rest of financial services gets on with it,” she says. “That is not how I see it at all. If you’re excluded from our economy, you’re excluded from society. It’s that important.”
For Rigby, that question of participation also extends to the barriers women continue to face, both within financial services and across the wider economy. There has been significant progress, she says, but barriers remain – from the disproportionate impact of caring responsibilities on women's careers to the gender pay gap to the difficulty female-founded businesses still face in accessing capital.
Speaking to Rigby, you detect a sense of impatience to address those barriers. A desire to understand the next challenge and step forward to meet it.
As Rigby herself acknowledges, she is a serious person and a serious politician. But seriousness, in her telling, is not simply about working hard. It is about understanding the problem in front of you and getting on with trying to solve it.
For now, at least, Rigby is just getting on with the next bit.
