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This Is Why

Interest rates up - focus on savers and renters

This Is Why

Sky News

News, Daily News, News Commentary

4.0552 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Bank of England has increased its base rate of interest by a quarter of a percentage point to 5.25% - which is lower than some economists had predicted.

On the Sky News Daily, Leah Boleto speaks to our business correspondent Gurpreet Narwan about the decision to raise interest rates for the 14th time in a row. Plus, Sky's data and forensics journalist Daniel Dunford explains why renters could be the hardest hit by rate rises, and Tilly Smith, from campaign group Generation Rent, on its call for the government to offer more support to people renting.

Podcast producer: Rosie Gillott
Interviews producer: Alex Edden
Podcast promotion producer: Jim Farthing
Editor: Paul Stanworth

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm Leah Belletto and this is the Sky News Daily and today we're talking about interest rates.

0:07.2

Well, the Bank of England has raised the rate for the 14th time in a row.

0:12.3

Today we've increased bank rate by 0.25 percentage points to 5.25%.

0:17.1

Low and stable inflation is the foundation of a healthy economy. High inflation hurts the least well off the most.

0:23.6

So how does this fit into that target of getting inflation down to 2%? And most importantly, what will it mean for savers, mortgage holders and actually renters too. Now, we know why mortgage holders

0:40.3

usually get the attention on a day like today, but they're actually in the minority in

0:45.7

England and Wales now, with more people renting and more people owning their own homes. So let's

0:52.0

go over this then with our business and economics correspondent, Gurpri,

0:56.0

Nouran. Gopri, good to see you. So here we are then, a quarter of percentage increase from the

1:02.7

Bank of England. Were we expecting this? Yeah, so the headline figure is 5.25%. It's a quarter of a

1:09.3

percentage point increase from the Bank of England today.

1:12.2

It was widely expected from economists.

1:15.6

So most economists were penciling in this increase.

1:17.8

There were no major shocks.

1:19.7

It now marks the 14th consecutive interest rate rise since December 2021,

1:24.9

when the bank first started raising interest rates from a record low of 0.1%.

1:30.0

So what's been the reaction? Because Labour will say, you know, actually, it was the Conservative government that, I suppose, accelerated with their mini budget, the hard times that people are experiencing now?

1:43.9

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of causes of

1:46.3

inflation that all interact. The major one, the biggest issue that we had to start with,

1:52.6

was imported inflation. So it was the energy crisis. It was the war in Ukraine that triggered

1:57.9

a massive spike in gas prices. And we're really vulnerable to that in the

2:01.9

UK because we use a lot of gas to heat our homes. We've also had a huge increase in food price

...

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