Homeowners should prepare for interest rates of 5pc, warns Bank of England markets chief Paul Fisher

Homeowners should start preparing for interest rate rises ahead of a return to “normalised” levels of around 5pc, a senior Bank of England official has warned.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Paul Fisher, the executive director of markets and a member of the rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), said central bank policymakers would like rates to increase as much as tenfold from their current historic low of 0.5pc as soon as possible.

“We hope people are aware that interest rates at some point will go up again and that they will head back to a normalised position,” he said. Confirming that “normalised” rates would be “around” 5pc, he added: “What we need to do is to trigger the mindset in people that that’s where rates will eventually go back to.”

Paul Fisher interview - the full transcript

His comments came as minutes from this month’s MPC meeting suggested that policymakers are already considering rate rises to stave off the risk of soaring inflation. “Most of those members considered that the accumulation of news over recent months had probably shifted the balance of risks to inflation in the medium term upwards,” the minutes noted.

Market expectations have also jumped in the past month, with rates in two years’ time now forecast to be 2pc rather than the 1.5pc being predicted in November.

Mr Fisher’s warning follows a stark Bank research paper indicating that more than 7m homeowners are at risk of rate rises. Two thirds of mortgage borrowers are currently on variable rates, it found, compared with roughly half in a typical year. On current wages, if rates were at 5pc, households would be spending more of their disposable income on debt interest than at any time in the past 20 years, the Bank’s analysis showed.

According to separate Bank data, variable rate homeowners are paying interest of 3.28pc on average compared with 4.34pc for those on fixed rates – equating to a £1,600 annual saving on a £150,000 mortgage. Household debt in the UK is £1.45 trillion, of which £1.2 trillion is mortgage borrowing.

Mr Fisher stressed that he had no timetable for rate rises, as any decision “will be conditioned on economic growth and prospects”, and that the Bank would proceed cautiously. “We would put rates up, see what the effect is and then judge how quickly to go,” he said. “I don’t think a change of 25 or even 50 basis points is going to trigger a recession.

“Obviously the first time we raise base rates that will be a big signal to people. But you’d like to think independent financial advisers and others will be bringing this home to people when they are arranging their mortgages and other borrowings.

“We have to bear in mind savers have being doing particularly badly while borrowers have been benefiting. We can’t favour one group over another.”

One MPC member, Andrew Sentance, has been voting for a quarter point rate rise since June. Yesterday’s minutes for the December meeting noted that he had reiterated that “a gradual withdrawal of monetary stimulus by raising Bank Rate was justified by recent economic developments”.

Mr Sentance remained the lone voice on the committee calling for a rise, with seven members choosing to hold rates and leave unchanged the £200bn of quantitative easing (QE) – or money printing, and one member voting for a £50bn increase in QE. It was the third consecutive month that the committee had been split three ways.

Economists noted that the MPC’s tone had changed dramatically since November. Andrew Goodwin, senior economic advisor to the Ernst & Young ITEM Club, said: “Reading between the lines it appears that the appetite for further quantitative easing has almost totally disappeared and, in this regard, the tone has become more hawkish.”

Vicky Redwood, senior UK economist at Capital Economics, added: “There is clearly a risk of a token rise in interest rates next year, especially if inflation expectations pick up further.”

Despite his rate rise comments, Mr Fisher warned that the recovery could suffer a temporary setback next year. “It’s not impossible that we would see a quarter of negative growth,” he said. “The output growth of UK tends not to be that volatile quarter to quarter but in this sort of situation when you are recovering from a deep recession it is not impossible.”

He added that the biggest risks the UK faces are how external –a fresh crisis in the sovereign debt markets, a spike in commodity prices or a collapse in US growth.