By David Milliken, William Schomberg and Yoruk Bahceli
LONDON, July 30 (Reuters) - The Bank of England kept interest rates on hold on Thursday as it waits for a keener sense of how much the U.S.-Iran war
will push up inflation, although the collapse of a tentative truce prompted a third policymaker to back a rate hike.
The Monetary Policy Committee voted 6-3 to keep rates at 3.75% rather than the 7-2 split most economists polled by Reuters had expected. Catherine Mann joined Megan Greene and Chief Economist Huw Pill in voting for a rise to 4%.
Other MPC members stuck with the wait-and-see approach of Governor Andrew Bailey, which he hopes will enable the central bank to avoid raising interest rates and adding to headwinds facing the economy which was suffering from sluggish underlying growth before the conflict broke out.
Bailey said expectations priced in to financial markets of a rate hike later in 2026 mostly reflected the risk of a further escalation of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, rather than a view that tightening was needed to tame existing price pressures.
He also said there had been no shift in the BoE's overall thinking about the need for higher borrowing costs.
"Please do not leave this room thinking that the Bank of England is edging towards a hike, because frankly, there's nothing in what I said, and I think any of us have said, along those lines," Bailey told reporters.
Two-year gilt yields, which are sensitive to the outlook for official borrowing costs, plunged 11 basis points on the day after Bailey's remarks, putting the bond on course for its biggest one-day price gain in three months.
Rate futures markets also pushed back their pricing for a first BoE rate rise to December from November.
"Crucially, the doves are getting more dovish. There's more clear water opening up between them and the hawks. And the bar for a rate hike seems to have risen," ING economist James Smith said.
NEW UK GOVERNMENT SEEKS TO LOWER COST OF LIVING
A continued stay on rates would be a relief for Britain's new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who has prioritised cost-of-living measures, including scrapping a tax on household electricity bills. The central bank said that would help lower inflation by a tenth of a percentage point.
The BoE's new central forecast - which assumes energy prices move broadly as markets expect and that spillovers from high energy costs into pay and price-setting are limited - showed inflation rising to 3.2% later this year from a 15-month low of 2.6% in June. Inflation then stays above target until early 2028, when it dips below 2%.
That is a softer inflation outlook than in the BoE's April quarterly forecasts but similar to what it predicted in June.
Most economists polled by Reuters expect the BoE to keep rates on hold this year, and Bailey said in a video clip posted online after the decision that cutting rates remained unlikely this year.
While the European Central Bank raised interest rates in June, Bailey has said the BoE can stay on hold because of a rise in market interest rates since the outbreak of the Gulf conflict in February when it effectively ended the BoE plans to cut rates this year.
The U.S. Federal Reserve kept rates unchanged on Wednesday but three policymakers preferred a quarter-point rise. Chair Kevin Warsh said he had "no tolerance" for inflation.
WIDENING MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT CAUSED MANN TO VOTE FOR HIKE
The BoE's Mann cited a breakdown of a tentative truce between the United States and Iran and a broadening of the conflict this month as the main trigger for her change of view.
Although British inflation is, unusually, below rates in the euro zone and United States, that largely reflects how regulated household energy bills in Britain lag behind market prices.
For the MPC members who backed a rate hike, the fact that inflation has been above the BoE's 2% target for almost all of the past five years increases the chance of damaging second-round effects and the need to be ahead of the curve.
Others saw no evidence that these risks were materialising and focused more on a weaker labour market, where private-sector pay is now growing at the slowest pace since 2020.
Deputy Governor Clare Lombardelli said her decision to vote to keep rates on hold had not been a finely balanced one. Some economists had expected her to vote for a rate hike this month.
Separately, the BoE raised its estimate of the impact of shrinking its government bond holdings, saying quantitative tightening (QT) had added a "modest" 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points to gilt yields since 2022, up from 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points in last year's assessment.
The MPC holds its annual vote on the pace of reducing its bond portfolio in September. The BoE slowed QT to £70 billion ($93 billion) a year in 2025 from £100 billion previously, and market participants expect a further reduction to £50 billion.
(Reporting by David Milliken, William Schomberg and Yoruk Bahceli, additional reporting by Suban Abdulla, Editing by Catherine Evans and David Gregorio)
