Paul Johnson

What's the most frustrating thing?

And they normally expect me to say raising funds, which is fair enough.

But actually, the most frustrating thing was the number of person years spent trying to extract data and to manage data and to connect data, not because it's technically difficult, but because of the immense legal bureaucracy around it.

Now, I'm not a lawyer.

My guess is

is that this is massively over-engineered and that there's many more barriers put in place than needs to be.

But I don't know that for sure.

But it's incredibly badly managed, in my view, across government in ways that just make it very hard to achieve.

Well, it's a really – it's a genuinely hard decision for the bank, I think.

But they will probably feel burnt by their previous decisions.

I mean, if you look back to 2021, 2022, they were relatively slow to put up rates, partly because they thought that this is –

And once that shock's gone, then it'll all kind of come out of the system.

So we don't need to do very much to deal with a one-off shock.

And it does seem odd, doesn't it, that you have, as you say, an increase in prices created by something happening thousands of miles away, hopefully will be temporary.

Putting up interest rates isn't going to reduce the price of energy.

So why would you even think about it?

And the answer, of course, is this flows through into all sorts of other things over a period of time.

Not least, if prices go up this year, it feeds through into people's expectations of where prices will be next year and into wage settlements.

And as energy prices go up now, that results in higher prices in services and so on down the line.

So the bank will be thinking about how to balance off those two things.