The Bank of England's credibility is seeping away

Telegraph

6 hours ago

The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) should not have lowered its main policy interest rate this month. That cut from 4.25pc to 4pc was a 'significant error', I wrote last week, that could 'come back to bite us'.
Financial market movements over the last week have convinced me I was wrong. The MPC's latest move was in fact a very significant error. If officials at the Bank of England aren't alarmed about the growing gap between the MPC's policy rate and the cost global investors now charge the UK Government to borrow, they should be.
And if ministers aren't concerned, not least Treasury ministers, I have to wonder if they really understand what is going on.
My main objection to the MPC's latest rate cut is that UK inflation remains high and is rising. By lowering rates when inflation is still clearly a problem, besetting Britain to a greater extent than other comparable economies, the MPC undermines the Bank of England's credibility – at a time when such credibility is sorely needed.
During the year to June, the consumer price index rose 3.6pc, up from 3.4pc the previous month. This is the highest headline inflation rate since January 2024, with CPI growth consistently above the 2pc inflation target since last October.
Driven by elevated food, energy and transport costs, UK inflation is the highest in the G7 – and has been since June 2024. Britain also uniquely saw month-on-month CPI increases in April, May and June, so our inflation outlier status has become even more stark over recent months.
Earlier this month, even the MPC upped its inflation forecast to 4pc this autumn – but raised rates regardless. And there were no compelling reasons in the minutes of the committee's latest deliberations why price pressures will ease any time soon, let alone fast enough to justify dropping rates when inflation, on the Bank's own reckoning, will be double the official target as early as next month.
The seeping away of the Bank's credibility is now playing out in real time, not least since last weekend. Over the past year, as the policy rate has come down incrementally from 5.25pc to 4pc, the rate the Government pays to borrow long-term money has moved decisively in the opposition direction.
This is a bad sign, signalling that financial markets – not least the global pensions funds and insurance companies that lend government's big money and dominate sovereign bond markets – have a different view of inflation to MPC policymakers.
In competitive auctions to lend the Government money, these major institutional investors, even as the MPC has been cutting, have been demanding higher rates when lending to compensate for the elevated inflation they still think is coming.
Since last August, as the policy rate has shifted down 1.25 percentage points, the UK's 30-year gilt yield has been pushed sharply up – from less than 4.5pc a year ago to 5.3pc on the morning of Thursday Aug 7, prior to the MPC's midday announcement, a rise of more than 0.8 percentage points in the opposite direction.
By last weekend, that market-driven borrowing cost had gone up to 5.43pc, flying in the face of the Bank of England. Some mortgage providers even raised fixed-term lending rates following the MPC's cut – no doubt because they saw gilt yields reflecting investors' concerns the committee's view on inflation is wrong.
Such rate-splitting, as I call it, when policy and market rates move against each other, is a sign of growing financial instability. It indicates that market expectations have become unanchored from policymaker preferences – and in the end the market always wins.
I'm concerned that, over the past week, we've seen the 30-year rate rise even more, touching 5.57pc on Friday. So since the policy rate has been lowered 0.25 percentage points, the long-term cost of government borrowing has moved rightly the same amount in the opposite direction.
I argued last week that by lowering rates when inflation was clearly not tamed, the MPC was in danger of 'rate-splitting' to an even greater extent. That is what has happened.
Long-term bond yields are influenced by a multitude of factors, of course, and have lately been nudging up across the world. But the UK's outlier inflation status is matched by its outlier status when it comes to long-term borrowing costs too. Our 30-year yield is also easily the highest in the G7.
Even the governments of Europe's previous 'debt-crisis' nations can now borrow long-term money a lot more cheaply than the UK – namely Italy (4.52pc), Greece (4.26pc) and Spain (4.18) at the time of writing.
And those rising borrowing costs, of course, need to be paid by the British state – increasingly, it seems, by borrowing even more. In April 2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that the UK Government would borrow £85bn over the following 12 months. When the fiscal year ended this April, that total was actually £148bn, no less than £105bn of which was spent on debt interest.
In June alone, borrowing was £20.7bn – no less than £16.4bn of which was spent servicing our existing national debt. This is utter madness.
While the MPC should not have cut rates earlier this month, in the end those really at fault are government ministers – and, more generally, a political and media class that, for so many years, has dismissed the concerns of those of us who have constantly warned that nation states, while they can of course borrow, need to both borrow and spend responsibly.
Successive UK governments have not been doing so – today's Labour administration to an increasingly reckless extent.