Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s online CV exaggerated how long she spent working at the Bank of England.
According to a BBC News investigation Reeves left the Bank nine months earlier than she stated in her LinkedIn profile. This means she spent five and a half years working at the bank, including nearly a year studying.
Reeves’s profile claimed she worked at the Bank of England from September 2000 to December 2006.
However, BBC News now reports that she had left by March 2006 when she began working for Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) in West Yorkshire.
A former HR lead for the bank who helped with Reeves’ relocation also said she could recall her first day and it was in March 2006.
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A spokesman for Reeves confirmed that dates on her LinkedIn were inaccurate and said it was due to an administrative error by the team.
They said the Reeves hadn’t seen it before it was published.
Her profile was updated on Thursday morning just before the BBC broke the news, to reflect that the chancellor left the Bank of England in March 2006, with the rest of the profile being subsequently edited to clarify the dates she worked at HBOS.
However, Reeves had been given to exaggerating her time at the Bank, according to researchers. In a speech to the Labour Party Business Conference in February last year, Reeves said: “I spent the best part of a decade as an economist at the Bank of England.” She had repeated this claim in previous public appearances and in documents.
As she had already started at HBOS by the spring of 2006, her time at the central bank only amounted to five and half years. This included nearly a year studying for a Masters at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Last year, during previous controversy about Reeves’ CV, the Bank of England confirmed that Reeves had left in 2006 but refused to give the month of her departure saying it was a detailed staff record that it could not provide.
The chancellor’s online CV was also inaccurate over her time at HBOS, which her team has acknowledged. It stated that she left in December 2009, five months before she was elected to parliament in May 2010. But in fact her employment at HBOS finished in mid-May 2009.
The bank was undergoing restructuring at the time of Reeves’s departure and a spokesman for Reeves said she had taken voluntary redundancy.
She then spent a year campaigning ahead of the May 2010 general election without seeking further employment.
UK economy grows
In better news for the chancellor, the UK economy unexpectedly grew in the final three months of last year following a boost to the construction and services sectors.
The economy expanded by 0.1% between October and December, according to official figures, external, despite analysts predicting it would contract.
Growth in the quarter was driven by a range of industries, from pubs and bars to machinery manufacturers, having a strong December.
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