The Bank of England (BoE) recently announced that it will be holding interest rates at 5%.

This is the second consecutive month that the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee has voted to leave the base rate unchanged. With inflation recently reaching 3% and looking likely to rise further over the summer, the committee had to balance growth with a slowing economy. Leading up to the announcement, there had been some calls for a drop of 0.25% but many economists felt that this was highly unlikely especially after news of the rise in inflation.

Liam Bailey, head of research at Knight Frank, told PIN: “The problem that the BoE has is that it has to balance inflation pressures with the need to please the mortgage market. The problems within the mortgage market are not going to ease until the base rate is cut.”