As an economics editor, I spend one day every quarter under lock and key

In case you were under the impression that the life of an economics journalist is all canapes, conferences and cosy chats with experts, allow me disabuse you. Sometimes we get locked up.

That’s right: once every three months we’re led to a room deep underground. We must surrender our mobile phones. And once the door closes we’re not allowed to leave – even if nature calls. For two long hours.

This draconian procedure is part of the Bank of England’s Inflation Report “lock-in”. Once inside a room deep in the bank’s vaults (tantalisingly close to where they keep the country’s gold reserves) we’re handed a document. It contains the latest interest rate decision of the bank’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee, taken earlier that day, plus Threadneedle Street’s updated economic forecasts. Some officials brief us on the contents and then we’re permitted to type up a report on laptops, all while stuck in the same room.

Then, with a flourish, at noon on the dot, the wifi signal is turned on, enabling us to email our reports to our respective offices. After that, like the prisoners in Beethoven’s Fidelio, we’re allowed to emerge from the dungeon and get on with our lives.

We had the same lock-and-key treatment on Wednesday this week when the bank’s no-deal Brexit scenarios were released.

Why such a high level of security? The answer is that the information in those documents has the capacity to move the financial markets. Quite often, the pound goes up or down sharply when those figures are made public. If some trader in some City of London trading room were slipped that information early, before the rest of the market, they could potentially make a large profit. Any possibility of such a leak – even an accidental one – must be eradicated.

It’s fair to say that the bank is paranoid about information flow more generally. Its officials, unlike government ministers and special advisers, have a strict policy of not leaking or planting stories through off-the-record chats with hacks. There’s no policy kite-flying, no cynical news management through the media from Threadneedle Street.

I learned this lesson the hard way soon after I started covering economics and made the mistake of referring in one of my stories to a juicy nugget of information gleaned from a “Bank of England source”. My ears are still ringing now, seven years later, from the haranguing I received. Tragically, my invitation to the bank’s Christmas party that year also never arrived.

Irritating though it may be when, on occasion, the control freakery gets out of hand, I do think this hardline approach is broadly appropriate. None of us should be relaxed about the risk of private profiteering from public information. Surely better for journalists to suffer a little than for the integrity of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street to be compromised.

Yours,

Ben Chu

Economics editor