Families and businesses brace for tax hits as the Chancellor grapples with a growing funding gap Daily Telegraph 27/10/26 Millions of households are bracing for further tax rises as John Healey prepares to deliver his maiden Budget on Wednesday. With narrowing fiscal headroom, a ballooning welfare bill and the total government debt at £3tn for the first time, the Chancellor will be forced to walk an economic tightrope to avoid causing a spike in UK gilt yields. Mr Healey also faces sustained economic fragility stoked by conflict in the Middle East. Driven by rising government borrowing costs, the Exchequer is forecast to be £11bn worse off by 2029-30 than expected in March, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Advertisement Households are already facing tax increases on income from savings and rental properties from next April. It comes in addition to the continued squeeze on British workers from tax threshold freezes and plans to drag pensions into the scope of ...
I suspect the Chancellor will not be giving a clear picture this coming Wednesday Daily Telegraph For people of a certain age, the sight this Wednesday of a Labour chancellor by the name of Healey delivering the Budget will stir uncomfortable memories of what happened 50 years ago. In 1976, the Budget occurred in April, but by the autumn, people were seeing rather a lot of the then chancellor, one Denis Healey . The economy was in crisis. There was panic selling of the pound. Meanwhile, although inflation had fallen from its peak of more than 24pc the year before, it still stood at 14pc. In October interest rates hit 15pc, while the yields on 20-year gilts reached 16pc. In late September that year, Denis Healey applied to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan of $3.9bn ( £2.3bn). In December, he signed a letter of intent pledging to initiate large cuts in government spending to secure the loan. The detail about the state of the economy was then, of course, different f...