Earlier this week the Monetary Policy Committee met up for the July monthly meeting with regards to reviewing the base interest rate.

Following the meeting the Bank of England announced that it had decided to leave the base interest rate on hold for a further month, which came as no big surprise to most industry experts, who have predicted as much.

This is the fourth month in a row that the base interest rate has remained unchanged, although it is still at its lowest level in the three hundred and fifteen year history of the Bank of England, standing at just 0.5 percent.

In addition to announcing that the base rate would remain on hold the central bank also announced that as yet it had now further plans to extend its quantitative easing programme, which has already seen it plough £125 billion into the economy through the purchase of government and corporate bonds.

In total the government originally announced that up to £150 billion would be made available through this programme, but has decided to hold off putting the remaining £25 billion in.

Some industry officials have said that the reason behind the bank’s decision to not extend the quantitative easing programme was because it wanted to take stock of the situation and assess what sort of effect the programme had had on the economy so far before ploughing any more into it.

However, some industry groups have said that the central bank should have extended the quantitative easing programme further right away.

The British Chambers of Commerce did not agree with the Bank of England decision, stating: “Quantitative easing is not yet fully effective and there is a strong case for raising the proportion of private sector assets that the MPC purchases. It is important to significantly increase the programme’s size, so as to underpin business confidence.”

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