Martin Weale, one of the nine members of the BoE's Monetary Policy Committee, told Bloomberg News in an interview that he would not want to hold off on voting for a rate hike until he was "absolutely clear" that it was the right decision.
Weale voted to raise rates in late 2014 but has held off since then after global oil prices pushed British inflation below zero. Inflation in December picked up to 0.2 percent, still far below the BoE's target of 2 percent.
Weale told Bloomberg that he had a positive outlook on Britain's economy and that much of the fall in inflation was due to one-off effects from the drop in commodity and food prices.
The pound's drop against other currencies "could easily offset, or more than offset, the oil-price effects and the wage effects," that are weighing on inflation, he said.
"I certainly wouldn't want to wait until I was absolutely clear that an increase was needed," Weale said on the prospect of voting once again to raise borrowing costs.
"To my mind, in January, we weren't at the point where it seemed more likely than not."
Sterling slid to a seven-year low against the dollar on Thursday and struggled against the euro as a brutal sell-off that started a month ago accelerated.
Weale said in a speech published earlier on Thursday that inflation could come under pressure from a likely reduction in the number of hours worked by British workers.
He told Bloomberg this meant the annual rate of wage growth might need to pick up by less than widely thought -- perhaps by just 0.3 percentage points from its current rate of around 2 percent -- to get inflation back on target.
(Reporting by William Schomberg and David Milliken; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
