Interest rate rise: lack of dissenting voices came as a surprise

Bank had been poised to act for some time but the unanimous vote should raise eyebrows

In the end, there were no doubters. Despite some markedly mixed signals from the economy in recent months, the nine members of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee (MPC) voted unanimously to raise interest rates by a quarter point to 0.75%. The decision to lift official borrowing costs above 0.5% for the first time in almost a decade came as no surprise, but the lack of any dissenting voices certainly did.

The Bank's latest quarterly health check on the economy is almost identical to the one it produced in May. Back then, the MPC had been gearing up for a rate rise but put the move on hold because it wanted to make sure that the weakness of the data for the first three months of 2018 reflected only temporary weather-related effects linked to the "beast from the east" storm.

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