FORMER East Lancashire schoolboy and now bank chief Martin Taylor is to head up a new Government task force.

The chief executive of Barclays Bank will be responsible for looking at ways to improve incentives for people to work and get people out of the 'benefits trap'.

Mr Taylor, 44, is expected to suggest sweeping reforms to the way tax and benefits systems operate.

Chancellor Gordon Brown said Mr Taylor would bring "a first rate mind and the ability to find practical solutions."

Mr Taylor, a former pupil at Sunnybank School, Burnley, won a scholarship to Eton when he was 11.

He later went to Oxford University and became a journalist, first with Reuters and then the Financial Times.

He moved into industry with Courtaulds, where he became chairman in 1993 and was then appointed to the post of chief executive of Barclays, Britain's biggest bank.

In an exclusive interview he gave earlier this year to East Lancs 2000, the Lancashire Evening Telegraph's business magazine, he revealed he had kept the same bank account he opened with Barclays in Burnley when he was a schoolboy.

Mr Taylor, who is married with two children and lives in London, still regularly returns to East Lancashire to see his parents who live in Simonstone and his brother Richard, a Burnley solicitor, who lives in Barrowford.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.