QUOTES-Bank of England policymakers speak after cutting rates from 16-year high

LONDON (Reuters) - The Bank of England cut interest rates for the first time since 2020 on Thursday, lowering them from a 16-year high after a narrow vote by its policymakers who split over whether inflation pressures had eased sufficiently.

Below are comments from a press conference with Governor Andrew Bailey and other BoE policymakers:

BAILEY ON PAY RISE FOR PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS:

"Public sector pay obviously has an effect on demand and it can have a signalling effect. On the whole I think private sector pay tends to lead public sector pay and that's what we've been seeing, actually."

"We'll get the full story with the budget, obviously, because we haven't got the full story yet because obviously we don't know how this is going to be funded, the Chancellor's got decisions to make on that front."

BAILEY ON WHETHER POLICY IS 'ONE AND DONE' ON RATE RISES:

"I'm not giving you any view on the path of rates to come, I'm saying we will go from meeting to meeting, as we always do."

BAILEY ON INFLATION PERSISTENCE:

"Is the decline of persistence now almost baked in, as the global shocks that drove up inflation unwind, or, we'd also require a period with economic slack in the UK economy, or are we experiencing a more permanent change to wage and price setting which would require monetary policy to remain tighter for longer?"

"These have become important questions in the MPC's policy deliberations."

BAILEY ON EVENTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST:

"I think we have to be very vigilant on this front."

"We decided that the risk, the skew that we had in the forecast, up till now, since those events started, we wouldn't retain because of the fact that we haven't seen the signs of it emerging. But I don't for a moment want to give you the impression that means we're not very vigilant about this, because ... things can change very quickly."

BAILEY ON FUTURE RATES:

"It's reasonable to say that it's unlikely that we are going back to the world we were in between 2009, post the financial crisis, and the point at which we started raising rates. The reason for that is that that world was really driven by very big shocks."

"It's much more likely it seems to me that we're going back to a world ... where we will be somewhere around whatever the neutral rate turns out to be."

DAVE RAMSDEN ON INFLATION:

"The degree of restrictiveness that we've still got, I think everyone on the committee sees that as necessary to squeeze the persistent part of inflation to ensure that inflation stays sustainably at target."

RAMSDEN ON QUANTITATIVE TIGHTENING:

"We're confident that QT can keep operating in the background, for the next year, consistent with our principles. And given where bank rate now is, if there needs to be some kind of adjustment, we've got more than enough space to do that."

(Reporting by Alistair Smout, James Davey, William James and Sarah Young, Editing by Kylie MacLellan)