In a 2021 magazine interview, which she subsequently posted on X, she said: “I spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England and loved it.”

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 said the same thing in a speech at a CEO summit in July 2022, and in a video posted on her Facebook page in the same month.

The claim was also repeated in a Labour party document last year which stated that she spent “most of the first decade of her career at the Bank of England”.

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 (LSE).

Last year, during previous controversy about Reeves’s 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 which they couldn’t provide.

Reeves also stood for election in Bromley in south-east London more than three months after she had taken a job in West Yorkshire.

She stood in a by-election on 29 June 2006 but had taken up a role at HBOS in March that year and received a relocation package to move from London. It is understood she rented a flat in Leeds and kept a flat in London at this time.

The Chancellor’s online CV gives incorrect dates for her time at HBOS as well, which her team also acknowledged. It states that she left in December 2009, five months before she was elected to parliament in May 2010.

In fact, we have established, her employment at HBOS finished in mid-May 2009, when she signed a compromise agreement. An invoice for legal advice on the agreement stated that it arose “from a decision by your employer to terminate your employment”.

The bank was undergoing restructuring at the time of Reeves’s departure and a spokesman for the Chancellor said she had taken voluntary redundancy.

A compromise agreement, now known as a settlement agreement, is a legal document between an employer and employee which HBOS used when senior managers were made redundant.