The Bank of England is expected to expand its radical programme of printing money by a further £50 billion today as it steps up the fight against the deepest economic downturn in decades.

Whilst other countries have begun to emerge from the recession, recent figures revealed a 0.4% slump in the UK economy between July and September, leading experts to predict that Mervyn King, the Bank’s Governor and the rest of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will extend the total size of its quantitative easing plan to £225 billion - the size of the entire Greek economy. This is the sixth quarterly contraction in a row.

“It is a lot of money, but if it does restart the economy and gets it moving again then it’s worth it,” said George Buckley, an economist at Deutsche Bank. “It’s very difficult to say if quantitative easing is working, but it is doing something.”

Uncertainty over the impact of QE also grew recently after the latest figures showed a 0.9% decline in the Bank’s preferred measure of money growth last month.

The continued slump has left Britain trailing behind other major economies, including the USA, France and Germany.

If the Bank of England chooses to expand its quantitative easing programme to £225 billion, it would soon be holding bonds worth 15% of the UK’s economy in its balance sheets.

The MPC is also expected to keep interest rates at their current low of 0.5%, in order that borrowing remain as cheap as possible. Yesterday evening the US Federal Reserve opted to keep interest rates between 0% and 0.25%, and said they would remain “exceptionally low” for an extended period.

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