Rachel Reeves has exaggerated her time working at the Bank of England as the Chancellor has been caught embellishing her CV.
Reeves left the financial institution nine months earlier than stated in her LinkedIn profile.
She has publicly claimed to have spent a decade working there, however it it shown she spent five and a half years working at the bank, including almost a year studying.
The Chancellor’s LinkedIn profile claims she worked at the Bank of England from September 2000 to December 2006.
Reeves left the financial institution nine months earlier that stated in her Linkedin profile
PA
However the BBC has found that in reality she left her job in March 2006 and began working for Halifax Bank of Scotland in West Yorkshire.
A photo from March 2006 shows her with other HBOS employees at the Council of Mortgage Lenders yearly lunch.
A former HR lead from the bank also confirmed she recalled Reeves’s first day as being in March 2006.
A spokesman for the Chancellor confirmed the error in her Linkedin, claiming it was due to an admin error by the team.
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The spokesman added that Reeves had not seen it before it was published.
The Chancellor has previously cited her time as an economist at the Bank of England as part of the reason she can be trusted with the UK’s finances, repeatedly claiming to have spent up to 10 years there.
Speaking at a Labour Party Business Conference in February, she said: “I spent the best part of a decade as an economist at the Bank of England.”
The claim was then repeated in a Labour party document last year which claimed that she spent “most of the first decade of her career at the Bank of England”.
Rayner said the controversy related to Reeves’s time before she was Chancellor
PA
Her online CV also gives the wrong dates for her time at HBOS, which her team has also acknowledged.
It says that she left in December 2009, although it has been established she finished in mid May 2010.
In November 2024, several MPs raised the topic in the House of Commons, with journalists also asking Deputy PM Angela Rayner if Sir Keir Starmer expected members of his cabinet to be truthful on their CV.
Rayner said the controversy related to Reeves’s time before she was Chancellor.
She added: “The prime minister is very clear that what is most important is having a chancellor who is able to balance the books and who is able to be straight with the public and restore the public finances,” she added.
