FORMER governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has doubled down on his claim that Brexit was always likely to “add to inflationary pressure” and has devalued the pound.

Last month, Mr Carney claimed that in 2016, when the UK voted to leave the EU, the “British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s”, adding that “now it is less than 70%”.

Some economists had contested the 70% figure, but Mr Carney has doubled down on his claim and hit out at the economic impact of Brexit.

Mr Carney has now stressed that the value of the pound began to tumble when the Brexit referendum was announced and “it hasn’t recovered”.

Speaking on the Today programme, he said: “It’s relatively rare that you get big differences between the two [exchange rates].

“But you get them when you have a long-standing shock to productivity in the economy and that is unfortunately what we’re getting in the UK. It was predicted that we would get that. It is coming to pass. And … it is one of the issues the Bank of England is facing.

“This is what we said [before Brexit] was going to happen, which is that the exchange rate would go down, it would stay down, that would add to inflationary pressure, the economy’s capacity would go down for a period of time because of Brexit, that would add to inflationary pressure, and we would have a situation – which is the situation we have today – where the Bank of England has to raise interest rates despite the fact that the economy is going into recession.”