Former MPC member urges BoE to tighten policy faster

Treasury Select Committee

A former member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee has argued the Bank of England should unwind its quantitative easing at a faster rate.

Speaking at a hearing of the Treasury Committee on the Bank of England's strategy today (18 April), economist Andrew Sentance, now senior adviser at Cambridge Econometrics, said he agreed with the decision to tighten monetary policy. However, he called plans to sell just over £6.5bn gilts a month "modest" and "asymmetric", compared to recent QE, which saw the Bank purchasing bonds at a rate of £20bn per month. From February 2022, the BoE began rolling back QE by no longer replacing maturing gilts, and in November the same year, it began actively selling the bonds it had purchased unde...