Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said today that policymakers has no plans to trim interest rates next month, according to an interview published on the Newcastle Journal's Web site.
Mr King also said that the central bank was not targeting consumer spending or retail sales, in comments that suggested the MPC is not necessarily set to cut rates from 4.5 per cent in the next few months as many in financial markets are expecting.
"The whole point of our policy is that we don't go into meetings with a fixed view we have decided before. So I can't promise an interest rate cut but what I can promise is that we won't make up our minds until we meet in November," Mr King was quoted as saying.
His quoted remarks followed a speech last night in which King said policymakers need to keep an open mind about the next policy move as the extent of the economic slowdown in Britain is unclear.
Mr King noted in the newspaper interview that the UK economy was shifting away from heady consumer spending growth of recent years but that this was not necessarily a bad thing.
"We are going through a rebalancing of the economy in which consumer spending has been fast but it is not going to grow as fast as it has done from the late 1990s to 18 months ago. That was never going to be sustainable," he was quoted as saying.
"We are now shifting away from consumer spending to more business investment and more exports, which is a sensible move in terms of the rebalancing."
Mr King said that shift would be helpful to manufacturers and therefore helpful to the North-east region of the UK.
The BoE cut its base interest rate for the first time in two years in August, by a quarter point to 4.5 per cent but has held them steady since.