Growing signs that the economy’s slump is easing off mean that the Bank of England should pause this month in its aggressive eight-month campaign to jump-start growth, The Times Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) believes.

But members of the independent panel of economic and financial experts have sounded warnings that the Bank must also be alert to dangers that an emerging recovery could quickly founder, or even prove illusory.

Amid burgeoning market hopes of economic resurgence in Britain and across the developed world, the starkest warning from The Times MPC over the threat of “false dawns” came from Professor Charles Goodhart, a founding member of the Bank’s own MPC. “We are currently in a Potemkin recovery — more appearance than reality,” he said, in reference to the fake “Potemkin villages” constructed in 18th-century Russia to deceive Empress Catherine II.

“It is fuelled by a relief bounce in the stock market — relief that the spectre of Armageddon in the financial system has been banished.” He added that misguided optimism was also being stoked by a rebound in stock-building by businesses that previously had made drastic cuts in inventories.

Professor Goodhart said that any recovery prospects were jeopardised by the need for highly indebted households to make sharp cuts in what they owe and by the next government’s need to cut massive public borrowing.

Similar concerns were voiced by other panel members. Sushil Wadhwani, another former Bank MPC member, said he believed that a “cyclical recovery should be possible”. However, he feared that “the failure to sort out the difficulties in the global banking system . . . should prove to be an impediment to sustainable growth over the medium term”.

Sir Steve Robson, former second permanent secretary to the Treasury, added: “The real issue is whether a recovery will be sustainable. I fear it will not be. Little or no progress has been made in sorting out the underlying causes of the crisis.”

Despite such anxieties over the longer-term outlook, The Times MPC was unanimous in recommending that the Bank should put its growth policy on hold this month. That recommendation follows the Bank’s move at its last meeting to increase by £50 billion, to £125 billion, the amount of newly created funds it is pumping into the economy under its controversial “quantitative easing” strategy.

Geoffrey Dicks, former chief UK economist at Royal Bank of Scotland, said: “They can afford to do nothing. Where it was right, tactically, in the early stages of the recession for the MPC to be hyperactive, the tactics now should be to play it longer [and] less frenetically.”

Rupert Pennant-Rea, former deputy governor of the Bank, agreed: “The MPC can afford to pause. If it wants to send a signal, it can say it will seek Treasury authority to do more [quantitative easing] if needs be.”

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