Gordon Brown will help guide Wales’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic as part of a new advisory group.

The former Labour prime minister is one of three external advisers expected to lend their expertise to help areas such as the economy and public services recover from the effects of Covid-19.

The Welsh Government’s counsel general and Brexit minister Jeremy Miles will lead the work on Wales’s recovery, with the full membership of his external advisory group still to be finalised.

But on Wednesday, the Welsh Government announced Mr Brown would be joined by Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Dr Rebecca Heaton, member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, as the first three names who have agreed to take part.

On Tuesday, Mr Brown, who was premier between 2007 and 2010, called on US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to “step up to the plate” and pledge to join a multibillion-pound drive to prevent a second wave of coronavirus.

He insisted there was a “deadly urgency” about nations working together now to stop a second wave of the disease impacting on the world’s poorest countries, and then returning to the rest of the globe.