UK unemployment and inflation reports - crumbs of comfort

Quite a busy day in UK markets, with the release of unemployment figures and the Bank of England's Quarterly Inflation Report. They both proved to
be slightly encouraging, giving sterling a bid tone.

Unemployment figures - mildly encouraging
The Jobless Claims Change for January disappointed slightly, at 6900, rather than the 3000 expected, but the Claimant Count Rate of unemployment stayed constant at 5.0 percent, as expected. The 3 month moving average measure of unemployment also stayed unchanged at 8.4 percent, but this had been expected to climb to 8.5 percent. Meanwhile average earnings figures were a tiny bit higher than expected.

Quarterly Inflation Report
The devil is definitely in the detail when it comes to the task of deciphering this prodigious tone and the interesting section is always that focusing on inflation - no surprise given the Bank of England's mandate.
If you look carefully, buried deep within this section, you find the following paragraph:

Charts 5.9 and 5.10 show the projected spread of outcomes
for CPI inflation in the final quarters of 2013 and 2014, and
their equivalents at the time of the November Report. The
inflation projection is somewhat higher than in November,
partly reflecting the larger stock of asset purchases on which
the forecast is conditioned, but also reflecting a higher path for
oil and some other commodity prices.

And later on:

Chart 5.11 shows frequency distributions for inflation: at the end of the forecast period, there is judged to be a roughly three-in-four chance
that inflation will be half a percentage point or more away
from the target, with roughly equal probabilities to the upside
and downside.

The highlights are mine.

If you look at Chart 5.11 it shows, for example, a 20 percent chance that annual CPI inflation will be below 0.5 percent in two years time, whereas, in November's Report, the same paragraph read:

Chart 5.11 shows frequency distributions for inflation: at the end of the forecast period, there is judged to be a roughly three-in-four chance that inflation will be half a percentage point or more away from the target, but with larger probabilities to the downside than to the upside.

And, back in November, Chart 5.11 showed a roughly 30 percent chance that annual CPI inflation would be below 0.5 percent in two years time.
These are rather arcane differences, but the market took them to imply that further Quantitative Easing was slightly less likely in the near future.

Green shoots for the economy - but will they be be killed off by winter frosts?