Bank votes 8-1 to hold interest rates
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- 05 Nov 2020
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The Bank of England (BoE) has once again held UK interest rates at the record low of 0.5%.
The Bank's Monetary Policy Committee, led by governor Mark Carney, voted 8-1 to keep rates unchanged.
UK interest rates have now remained on hold for six-and-a-half years.
Economists had not been expecting the Bank of England to raise interest rates this month. Instead, they are watching for indications of when the first rate rise since 2009 might come.
In what has been dubbed Super Thursday, the BoE has released its quarterly inflation report and minutes from its previous policy meeting as well as the latest decision on interest rates.
The minutes revealed that for the third month running, Ian McCafferty was the only member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to vote for a rise in interest rates.
In its quarterly inflation report, the Bank of England said "the outlook for global growth has weakened since August". It blamed emerging market economies for that weakness, saying growth in those regions had "slowed markedly".
Those global factors have made the Bank of England cautious about the outlook for inflation.
While the Bank expects inflation to to rise above its 2% target in two years, it says that risks "lie slightly to the downside" during that time period. In other words, inflation may not rise as quickly as the Bank forecasts.
