Lord Mann
Main Page: Lord Mann (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Penn
I agree with the noble Lord about the importance of a longer-term view. He is right that in the last five weeks we have focused on getting immediate support up and running for individuals and businesses, setting out those policies and making them operational, but that does not mean that there is not further work to be done to take into account the longer-term view of this crisis. It is true that facts are changing as we go along—the disease and our knowledge of it are changing—so we will want to take that into account as we develop our long-term plan.
Lord Mann (Non-Afl)
QE was used very successfully by the Bank of England in the banking crisis. Are discussions under way for some form of people’s quantitative easing to deal with the ensuing economic crisis?
Baroness Penn
Of course, decisions around monetary policy are for the independent Bank of England. It has already taken action in this crisis, including cutting the bank rate from 0.25% to 0.1% and introducing the Term Funding Scheme with additional incentives to support small and medium-sized enterprises during this time.