BoE's Taylor dismisses inflation concerns, renews call for lower rates, FT reports

(Reuters) -Bank of England policymaker Alan Taylor dismissed inflation concerns and renewed his call for lower interest rates in Britain amid risks to economic growth due to U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war.

Official figures showed last week that British inflation had jumped to a higher-than-expected annual rate of 3.5% in April, from 2.6% in March.

Taylor, however, said he was not concerned by the data as the higher inflation was "coming out of one-time tax and administered price changes."

Taylor and another Monetary Policy Committee member, Swati Dhingra, had voted for a bigger half-point cut in the central bank's policy meeting in May, where rate-setters cut interest rates by quarter of a percentage point to 4.25%.

“I’m not going to pre-emptively announce my vote, but I think I indicated in my dissent that I thought we needed to be on a lower (monetary) policy path" Taylor told the newspaper.

Taylor, the newest member of the MPC, said he was concerned by the trade situation. He made similar comments earlier in May.

"I’m seeing more risk piling up on the downside scenario because of global developments,” he said, adding that the impact of Trump’s tariffs on imports would “be building up over the rest of this year in terms of trade diversion and drag on growth”.

Taylor's comments were reported by the FT after the central bank's governor Andrew Bailey said in a speech on Thursday that its "gradual and careful" approach to future interest rate cuts was justified by ongoing uncertainty about the global trade picture and its impact on domestic inflation.

(Reporting by Gursimran Kaur and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom Hogue and Lincoln Feast.)