Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news Interest rates in the UK should be cut further this year amid predictions for a sharp slowdown in inflation, a senior Bank of England policymaker has said. According to Alan Taylor , an external member of the Bank’s monetary policy committee, cooling energy prices and measures to cut living costs in Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget should help to get inflation back to its 2% target by mid 2026. Interest rates should continue on a downward path, that is if my outlook continues to match up with the data, as it has done over the past year. Tax and administered price hikes will fall away in April, new Budget measures will then lower inflation by an estimated 0.5 percent, food inflation has fallen materially, and energy prices have stabilised at lower levels. I see this as sustainable, given cooling wage growth, and I now therefore expect monetary policy to normalise at neutral sooner rather than later. There’s a number of things happening with business rates. There’s been a revaluation of the value of properties. This is the first one since the pandemic. So rateable values were going to go up. And there’s a gradual withdrawal of some of the temporary support that went in during Covid. Continue reading...