Torsten Bell is the Labour MP for Swansea West and Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Pensions, also a Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury. Born in Greenwich in September 1982 and educated at Mansfield College, Oxford, he is an economist, author and newspaper columnist with one of the most technically prepared profiles in government.

His career has run through the centre of economic policy. He was a Treasury civil servant working on youth unemployment and child poverty before becoming a special adviser to Chancellor Alistair Darling during the 2008 financial crisis, a political appointment at the heart of crisis management rather than a generic advisory role. He then served as Director of Policy for Ed Miliband and, from 2015 to 2024, as Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation, the think tank focused on living standards for working people.

His route into Parliament was abrupt and contested. He was selected for Swansea West on 31 May 2024, just five weeks before the election, after Geraint Davies was suspended over allegations and could not stand. Bell has no prior connection to Swansea or Wales, and the party was accused of parachuting a favoured candidate against local members' wishes. He won comfortably with a majority of 8,515 (23.9 percent), served as PPS to the Cabinet Office, and in January 2025 was appointed to his pensions ministerial brief, the first Swansea West MP to become a government minister in half a century. The former Pensions Minister Steve Webb said he would arrive "with a deeper knowledge of pensions than many of his predecessors".

Bell's strengths include a Mansfield College Oxford education, his role as special adviser to Darling during the financial crisis, the Director of Policy role for Miliband, nine years as Resolution Foundation chief executive, his standing as an author and columnist, deeper pensions knowledge than most predecessors, being the first Swansea West minister in 50 years, and a 23.9 percent majority. His weaknesses include having no connection to Swansea or Wales before a selection five weeks out, the parachute accusation, the contradiction between Resolution Foundation poverty analysis and a ministerial defence of welfare restraint, the pensions brief being constrained by Treasury spending limits, and the optics of representing a Welsh seat from a London-born, Oxford-educated background. At 43, with Oxford, the Treasury, the Resolution Foundation and a ministerial brief, he is one of the best-credentialled new ministers in government. Whether the pensions expertise produces reforms that working people in Swansea feel, or whether the poverty expert ends up managing disappointment from inside the machine, is the question that will define him.