Summary European Central Bank has also decided to keep its key interest rate on hold at the level of 0.15 %.
LONDON (AFP) - The Bank of England on Thursday opted to keep its main interest rate at a record-low level of 0.50 percent against a backdrop of solid British economic growth.
The British central bank s nine-member monetary policy committee decided also to maintain the level of cash stimulus in the economy at £ 375 billion ($632 billion, 472 billion euros), it said in a statement.
Bank of England governor Mark Carney said last month that the BoE needed to start hiking record-low interest rates in the coming months as the British economy was rapidly gaining strength.
Speculation that a hike could come either late this year or early in 2015 have helped to boost the British pound against other currencies in recent months.
Reasons behind Thursday s decisions will be given next week when the Bank of England publishes its latest forecasts on inflation. Minutes of the latest policy meeting will be released in two weeks time.
"Attention will now turn to the inflation report and the minutes of today s meeting for a further steer on the committee s current thinking," said Elizabeth Martins, economist at HSBC bank.
"Although the vote in July was unanimous, the minutes suggest that for some members the decision is becoming much more of a close-run thing. As such, the market remains focused on the breakdown of the votes" for clues are when rates are likely to rise. In the second quarter, Britain s economy grew strongly to become larger than before the global financial crisis.
Gross domestic product (GDP) expanded by 0.8 percent between April and June from the first quarter, when it grew by the same amount, recent official data showed.
The latest figures, along with a sharp fall in unemployment to the lowest level for five years, could give a boost to the government before a general election next year.
The Bank of England s key task is to keep British 12-month inflation close to a government-set target of 2.0 percent. The rate accelerated to 1.9 percent in June.
The bank slashed borrowing costs to 0.50 percent in March 2009 to help boost growth after the financial crisis and they have remained there ever since.
It was also more than five years ago that the BoE launched radical quantitative easing to stimulate economic growth with billions of pounds of newly-created cash.
The International Monetary Fund recently forecast that growth in Britain, a member of the European Union but not of the eurozone, would outpace the world s major advanced economies this year.
Also on Thursday, the European Central Bank said it had decided to keep its key interest rate on hold at the level of 0.15 percent.
