Monetary Policy Committee publication dates for 2016 and provisional dates for 2017

Under current legislation, the MPC must meet and announce a policy decision at least once a month. Therefore, as shown in Table 1, the MPC has provisionally scheduled twelve meetings for both 2016 and 2017. 

However, the Government has announced that it proposes to introduce to Parliament in this session a Bank of England Bill which will include a provision to move the MPC to a schedule of eight regular meetings a year. To provide scope for such a change, the MPC published last December a provisional schedule for 2016 in which eight of the twelve annual meetings are spaced roughly evenly through the year with the intention that, if Parliament passes the proposed legislation to make the change, the MPC could drop the remaining four meetings once the law has changed. Those four meetings are provisionally scheduled for January, April, July and October. The remaining eight meeting dates would be unaffected by the switch. The provisional schedule for 2017 preserves this structure.

The MPC will meet on the first three of these provisional dates, in January, April and July 2016. Following the July 2016 meeting, the MPC will move promptly to the eight meeting schedule as and when the Bill has received Royal Assent and the provisions have come into force. So if that were to happen at any point before October 2016, then the meeting currently scheduled for that month would be dropped, as would the meetings currently scheduled for January, April, July and October 2017, as highlighted (*) in the table below. 

Table 1: Monetary Policy Committee publication dates for 2016 and provisional dates for 2017 ^{1 2}

Month	MPC Announcement and Minutes	Inflation Report Publication
January 2017 *	Thursday 12
February 2017	Thursday 2	Thursday 2
March 2017	Thursday 16
April 2017 *	Thursday 13
May 2017	Thursday 11	Thursday 11
June 2017	Thursday 15
July 2017 *	Thursday 13
August 2017	Thursday 3	Thursday 3
September 2017	Thursday 14
October 2017 *	Thursday 12
November 2017	Thursday 2	Thursday 2
December 2017	Thursday 14

<sup>1. Dates are subject to change.
2. As described in Annex 1 of the Bank’s 11 December 2014 report Accountability and Transparency at the Bank of England, the MPC will typically meet on the Wednesday immediately prior to the announcement and the preceding Monday and Thursday.</sup>

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