Minutes of meetings held by the central bank’s senior ‘Court’ committee between 2007 and 2009, released on 7 January, also show the BoE’s governing body was kept in the dark over key decisions such as bank recapitalisation.

Details of a meeting in July 2007, for example, show the Court of the Bank focused on discussing staff pensions and new members of the Monetary Policy Committee.

The Bank identified that liquidity was a concern but took no action to resolve this.

Members were also told the Bank was working on a model to detect risk in the financial system. But the minutes also showed a report by Andy Haldane, now chief economist at the Bank, did not suggest “any looming gaps” in how the system worked.

Once problems were revealed, the Bank urged Court members to have faith in the tripartite framework of the Bank, the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury.

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Following the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007, the Court began using codewords for other banks at risk of failure. These includes ‘Tiger’ for Alliance and Leicester and ‘Badger’ for Bradford and Bingley.

But concerns from former Governor Mervyn King over potential conflicts of interest, and the suspicion that Court members had been leaking information to the press, meant the body was not notified of the Bank’s plan to recapitalise the UK’s leading banks in 2008 until after the fact.

Treasury Select Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie said the publication of the documents showed the Court, which primarily consists of non-executive directors, had done a poor job at holding the Bank to account and should have done more to challenge former Governor  King.

“The non-executive directors appear to have done little thinking of their own about financial stability and have added little or no substantive value to the Bank’s work on it,” he said.