Minutes of the Bank of England’s April board meeting shed new light on the massive programme of staff redeployment the central bank was forced to implement as the Covid-19 epidemic broke out in the UK.

Almost all of the bank’s 4,500 staff were forced to work from home, despite the need to keep critical financial infrastructure running and launch several crisis-fighting facilities, some of which had never previously been tried.

Remote technology “held up well”, say the minutes, which were