A Bank of England policymaker unexpectedly voted to raise interest rates this week and some among the majority who kept them at a record low felt it would not take much for them to follow suit, the bank said.
Kristin Forbes, who is due to leave the Bank of England in June, cast the sole vote in favour of raising its key interest rate to 0.5%.
This marked the first split on the Monetary Policy Committee since July of last year.
The other eight members of the MPC opted to keep rates at 0.25%.
They also signalled no immediate hurry on the part of the Bank of England to emulate the US Federal Reserve which raised interest rates yesterday for the third time since the global financial crisis.
Economists taking part in a Reuters poll had expected all nine MPC members to vote to keep rates unchanged.
The Bank of England expects Britain's economy to grow by a relatively strong 2% this year after withstanding the Brexit shock in 2016, but then to slow due to uncertainty about the country's exit from the European Union.
Most economists have predicted that the Bank of England will leave interest rates unchanged until 2019 at the earliest.
At their meeting this week, its policymakers mostly felt there were signs that UK consumers were turning more cautious as wage growth slowed and inflation rose, pushed up by the post-referendum fall in the value of the pound.
"Pay growth had remained subdued, consistent with the Committee's view that some slack remained in the labour market, and there had been some signs that the squeeze in households' real income growth was feeding through into spending, as expected," the bank said in minutes of the March interest rate meeting.
Data published this week showed annual pay growth slowing to 2.2% in the three months to January, heading in the opposite direction to the Bank of England's forecast of an increase to 3% in 2017 as a whole.
However, among the eight-strong majority, "some members noted that it would take relatively little further upside news on the prospects for activity or inflation for them to consider that a more immediate reduction in policy support might be warranted," the minutes said.
The Bank of England's nine policymakers voted unanimously to make no changes to its bond-buying stimulus programme, in line with the expectations in the Reuters poll.
The bank had said in February that some of its rate-setters had "moved a little closer" to their limits for tolerating an overshoot of its inflation target, caused by sterling's slide since June's Brexit vote.
Forbes, who is due to return to her career as a US academic after leaving the Bank of England in June, had signalled she was getting uncomfortable with keeping rates on hold.
Today's minutes showed she felt measures of domestically generated inflation - and not just price pressure from the slump in the value of sterling since last June's Brexit vote - had increased notably and the expected post-referendum slowdown in the economy had not materialised.
