Rachel Reeves CV row: CBI boss Rain Newton-Smith leaps to defence of Chancellor as 'very smart economist'
The Confederation of British Industry chief executive Rain Newton-Smith worked with Ms Reeves at the Bank of England in the early 2000s and said the Chancellor had been an impressive and well-respected colleague.
While at the Bank of England, Ms Reeves completed a Master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics and was subsequently in the Bank’s economic analysis division before moving to Yorkshire in 2006 after getting a job at Halifax Bank of Scotland.
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Hide AdMs Reeves has come under fire from the Conservatives and Reform MPs after a recent change was made to her CV on LinkedIn which had initially said she was an economist at HBOS.


It was updated to say her role at the bank was related to retail banking.
Speaking to The Yorkshire Post in Sheffield, Ms Newton-Smith praised the now Chancellor as an excellent and well-informed colleague when they both worked at the Bank of England early in their careers.
Both women had studied PPE at Oxford before going onto join the Bank’s graduate programme.
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Hide AdMs Newton-Smith said: “I joined as a graduate a couple of years ahead of Rachel, so I remember when she joined.
“She was a very smart, sharp economist and a brilliant colleague to work with - a true expert but always someone who would be thoughtful and supportive.
“There weren’t so many female economists at that time.”
She added: “She was absolutely a credible voice at the Bank of England.
“It has been over 20 years since we worked together but my recollection is she was seen as the housing expert while I worked on the corporate side of the economy. She was seen as a well-respected economist who was articulate but also really knew her numbers and her stuff, as everyone at the Bank of England had to.
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Hide Ad“You don’t get on those graduate schemes without being a really good, thoughtful economist. The training you got in their graduate scheme was really important, some of that was being embedded with colleagues who were experts across sectors.
“Very early on you would be making presentations to the Monetary Policy Committee on your area of expertise. If your subject came up you would be expected to answer and I know Rachel answered questions on her area of expertise, as did I.”
Both women also spent time in America as part of their work with the Bank, with Ms Newton-Smith seconded to the IMF and Ms Reeves working at the British Embassy.
The CBI boss said: “I can’t speak on her behalf but from those experiences you really get a sense of how the UK is viewed from outside the UK. I worked with businesses but also politicians and policy makers from around the globe and understood some of the challenges they were facing. I think that really gives you a depth of understanding.
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Hide Ad“I do think one of the things in the Budget Rachel Reeves was really able to deliver well was the change to fiscal rules to make that space for capital expenditure and I think her knowledge of financial services but also how international institutions and policy-making works stood her in good stead in being able to deliver that.”
She added: “Rachel is really respected and seen as understanding financial markets and the economy and I think those are really valuable skills as a Chancellor. Where we as the CBI can really help is bringing that perspective of what business leaders from across the whole corporate sector are thinking. That’s a value we can bring to any Chancellor.”
Newspapers over the weekend contested Ms Reeves’ claim in an interview with Stylist magazine from 2021 that she had spent a decade at the Bank of England, when her LinkedIn account described it as a six-year period between 2000 and 2006.
Ms Reeves’ LinkedIn profile lists her work history from 2000 onwards. It says she worked in three areas of the Bank over the six-year period she was employed there: its international economic analysis division, then at the British Embassy in Washington DC in the second secretary economic division, and finally in the structural economic analysis division.
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Hide AdAfter this it lists her time working for Halifax Bank of Scotland, then her political career following her election in 2010.
In a 2021 interview with The Yorkshire Post, Ms Reeves gave a detailed account of her time working at HBOS on its retail mortgages team.
She said: “At the time they were trying to change the market so people weren’t switching every two or five years but had long-term mortgages. To be honest, it was not something we succeeded in doing in part because of quarterly reporting and quarterly profits.
“To make big changes in markets you need longer. I do think the way our corporate governance works and the way profit reporting works sometimes discourages businesses from long-term investment decisions and changes in the business model.
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Hide Ad"If you can’t show results in three months or six months, then your share price tumbles and everyone wants a different strategy. So you end up sort of sticking with what you do rather than actually trying to make the change in the market that would be better for consumers.”
Read a full interview with Rain Newton-Smith in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post
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