Cunliffe, the Bank’s deputy governor for financial stability, said harsher rules for banks forcing them to hold more capital have already impacted shareholder returns but have yet to impact bankers’ salaries.

He said while banks’ profits may recover, pay packets may come under pressure if they do not, especially as regulators do not want to see the excessive risk-taking and leverage which preceded the financial crisis.

“The sluggish adjustment in pay [since the crisis] may well reflect the expectation that returns in banking are set to increase in the future,” he said.

“There are good reasons why they may do so. But, given lower levels of leverage, it is unlikely that we will see, or want to see again, the returns on equity that we saw before the crisis. In the new world, paybills may well have further to adjust.”

He added consumers’ ongoing lack of trust towards banks was likely to continue for ‘some time yet’, with bankers’ ability to keep paying themselves high salaries regardless of the economic environment likely to cause more ill will towards them.

Highlighting one such issue, he said employees at banks had received greater shares of profits than shareholders since the financial crisis.

He said: “Put simply, shareholders have gone from getting 60 cents for every dollar paid to staff to getting 25 cents per dollar. Across the big UK banks in 2013, the fraction had fallen to just 2% – that is to 2p per pound paid to staff.”

Shareholder returns have also fallen due to the number of fines issued to banks for Libor rigging and PPI mis-selling which has reduced pre-tax profits from £20bn to less than £10bn.

However, he hoped the cutbacks within banks on desks across the fixed income, commodities and currencies markets, the highest-paying areas of finance, would reduce the number of high earners and restore return-on-equity.

Cunliffe is not the only senior Bank of England member to criticise pay. Last week Andrew Bailey described the bonus cap as the “wrong policy” and that bonuses should be flexible.