Bank of England holds base rate for 79th consecutive month

by Aaron Strutt

Oct 08 2015

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has again voted to hold the base rate at 0.5%. This decision makes it more than six and a half years since the base rate last changed.

Ian McCafferty was the only one of the MPC’s members who voted to increase bank rate by 25 basis points. All of the others voted to maintain base rate.

Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight told the BBC: “An interest rate hike from 0.5% to 0.75% sometime in the first half of 2016 still looks much more likely than not.

“This is based on our belief that the UK will see some improvement in growth from its third-quarter soft patch and that consumer price inflation will start rising gradually from late 2015.”