About us
The Bank of England is the UK’s central bank. Our two core purposes are to ensure monetary stability and to contribute to financial stability. To achieve that, our staff are involved in a broad variety of complex and often very high-profile work.
Our most visible responsibilities are setting interest rates to control inflation and issuing banknotes. The Bank has a long track record for setting monetary policy, with the most significant recent change being the establishment of the independent Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in 1997. The Bank’s financial stability role will be greatly strengthened in the next few years through the establishment of a new Financial Policy Committee within the Bank, with control of macro-prudential tools to deal with systemic risks to financial stability. In addition a new Prudential Regulatory Authority, operating as a Bank subsidiary, will be responsible for prudential regulation of all deposit-taking institutions, insurers and banks. The Bank is also involved in a range of other activities relating to its role as the central bank, most obviously for the government and for other banks.
Much of our work is intensely collaborative. Not only is there a real spirit of teamwork within the Bank itself, we also manage many of our key responsibilities in tandem with different external partners. These range from private-sector finance organisations, through to public-sector bodies like HM Treasury, and other central banks across the world.