On this week's Peston podcast, I'll be talking to the Governor of the Bank of England about what the bank is doing to protect our livelihoods through this appalling health crisis and whether there's anything the bank can do to prevent austerity at the end of all of it.

Also, I'm talking to the shadow Chancellor Annalise Dodds about whether Labor would be doing anything different when it comes to the economy.

With me, too, are Mickey Morgan and Ed Davy.

I met with the Bank of England's Governor, Andrew Bailey,

who's right at the centre of trying to protect us from the worst economic costs of all of this.

And I asked him whether today's disclosure

that the economy shrank almost 6% in March alone, made it more or less likely that the banks' dire forecast

that we're in the worst recession, as Anushka said,

for 300 years, would turn out to be the terrible truth.

Well, I think it tends to confirm that we've got a very sharp move into recession,

and it was quite sudden, which is obviously what we've all observed from the shutting down in the economy.

So, to be frank, we're not really surprised by that number at all.

Now, you in your recent report said that the risks were on the so-called downside,

in other words, things might turn out worse than you feared.

Can you explain why that might be?

Yes, because I think there are a number of, sort of one might call,

sort of key drivers in the outlook when we spend a lot of time thinking about it.

So obviously, a first one is how, over what period of time we come out of the lockdown and the restrictions and how long

that takes to lift the restrictions and obviously what the sort of the advice from the epidemiologist

is on that front. We talk to them, but we're not experts on that front. But we can see that

could obviously go on for longer period of time. So that's the first thing. And how long are you

currently assuming it'll go on?

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