(Bloomberg) -- The U.K. economy needs a transition agreement to support it through the Brexit process, no matter what form the nation’s exit takes, according to Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.
“It is in the interests of the country to have some time to transition to whatever relationship there is,” he said in an interview with the BBC’s Today Program on Thursday. “We need some time to get ready for it and that is absolutely agnostic. It doesn’t take a preference to the type of Brexit but it is sensible to take a sober, objective view about how much time we need to get to where we’re going.”
Carney faced the press after BOE analysis published Wednesday warned the U.K. faces the steepest economic slump since at least World War II if it crashes out of the European Union without a deal. The central bank has come under heavy criticism from some lawmakers for being overly gloomy in its outlook and becoming too heavily involved in the political debate.
The governor defended the report, which was put together at the request of Parliament’s Treasury Committee, pointing out that his role is to help prepare the economy for financial shocks. The BOE will in coming weeks publish redacted minutes of preparation meetings since the Brexit vote in 2016 that had previously been held back, he said.
“We have been doing this type of analysis and getting the banks ready since the day after the referendum,” Carney said. “And that’s going to become abundantly clear in a couple of weeks when we unredact, when we release, minutes of this committee that we had kept back over the course of the last couple of years because we didn’t want to be pulled into exactly these types of conversations. That’s us doing our job.”