New Bank of England governor decision put off until after election

The announcement of a successor for Mark Carney as governor of the Bank of England has been postponed until after the general election.

With only days to go until parliament is dissolved, the chancellor Sajid Javid has abandoned plans to announce his choice for Threadneedle Street’s top job during the autumn.

The chancellor is believed to have made the decision to delay because he felt that making a choice at a politically sensitive time might damage the independence of the Bank.

The Treasury believes there will still be time for the newly appointed governor to be fully prepared to take over at the Bank by the time Carney is due to end his six-and-a-half stint at the end of January next year.

At this stage, there are no plans to ask Carney – who has twice extended his term – to stay on, with the Treasury confident that the new government will be in a position to make an appointment from a slate of candidates soon after the election on 12 December.

A panel of senior officials and the former monetary policy committee member Kate Barker sent a shortlist of candidates to the Treasury after holding interviews with applicants over the summer.

The shortlist is thought to include Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority; Minouche Shafik, head of the London School of Economics; Shriti Vadera, chair of Santander UK; and Ben Broadbent and Jon Cunliffe, both deputy governors at the Bank.

Several candidates cited as likely to be popular with the Treasury were not interviewed, including the former head of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan.

The shortlist is understood to have excluded Gerard Lyons, a Eurosceptic economist and former adviser to Boris Johnson when he was London mayor, who applied for the role.

Carney, however, was not on the shortlist drawn up to find a successor to Lord Mervyn King in 2013, and there is a possibility that if Labour won the election that the current shadow chancellor John McDonnell would want to appoint someone not currently in the frame.