As the autumn budget draws closer, speculation continues as to what policy changes will be announced and experts have a few ideas as to what they would like to see in the upcoming statement.
There has been growing nervousness over what chancellor Rachel Reeves will target in her first budget on 30 October to help raise funds to fill the £22bn “black hole” in public finances.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said on Thursday that the government would need to come up with £25bn in tax increases a year to keep pledges on public spending.
Reeves has ruled out increases in value added tax (VAT) and national insurance, as well as the main rates of income and corporation tax, leaving her with fewer levers to pull to raise funds.
However, she admitted that the government would likely have to raise some taxes in the budget.
In latest developments, the Guardian reported that Reeves is considering hiking capital gains tax (CGT), which is levied on the profits made from the sale of assets, to as high as 39%.
CGT rates across assets including shares and second properties range between 10% and 28%.
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Meanwhile, The Telegraph reported that Reeves is considering lowering the lump sum that savers can withdraw from their pension tax-free by two-thirds to £100,000, down from £268,275.
Reeves is also said to have abandoned plans to raise tax on pension contributions, according to the The Times. Senior Treasury advisers were understood to have told the chancellor that lowering the current 40% tax relief on pension contributions for higher earners would disproportionately hit public sector workers.
Another rumour is that Reeves could make changes to inheritance tax (IHT) which is levied on the estate of someone who has died, which includes property, possessions and money.
There is a tax-free threshold of £325,000, with a standard rate of 40% IHT after that point. One suggestion is that Reeves could decide to raise this rate or reduce the amount of relief that business owners can qualify for when passing these assets onto the next generation.
Reeves reportedly had until Wednesday to submit her main budget ideas to the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) ahead of the announcement.
A spokesperson for the Treasury was not available to respond to Yahoo Finance UK’s request for comment at the time of writing.
In the count down to budget day, wealth managers and investment platforms have shared what they would like to see in Reeve’s statement.
What experts want from the budget
Will Walker-Arnott, director of private clients at wealth manager Charles Stanley, tells Yahoo Finance UK that he would firstly like to see “a bit of certainty”.
“What’s been particularly unhelpful is the long gap we’ve had between the election…and the time it’s taken to actually put a budget together,” he says.
Looking back, Walker-Arnott points out that this period has been much longer than with previous administrations.
He says that this gap has created a “vacuum” for speculation over potential policy changes, the impact of which has been seen in consumer confidence indices. Indeed, UK consumer confidence suffered a big fall in September, according to recently released figures.
In terms of CGT, Walker-Arnott says that a more “sensible” approach if the government does decide to increase rates would be to do so by a “marginal” increase.
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“But clearly it’s not a policy which we would be supportive of in any way because I think it’s counterproductive to simulating growth in the UK economy,” he says.
ISA simplification
One area Walker-Arnott says his firm would be supportive of, in terms of simplification around individual savings accounts (ISAs), would be potentially having one form of this product going forward.
He would prefer to see “just a stocks and shares ISA because that would go hand-in-hand with Labour’s central mantra of growth”.
“In the UK, we have huge amounts of assets just held up in cash ISAs which really needs to be put to work – if you want to stimulate the economy, you want to grow the UK economy that needs to be put into work,” Walker-Arnott says.
Rachael Griffin, tax and financial planning expert at wealth manager Quilter, also says further simplification of the ISA system was needed.
“Limiting the number of new ISAs and focusing on encouraging investment in higher-return options such as stocks & shares ISAs should be high on [the government’s] list of priorities,” she says.
Lifetime ISAs (LISAs) should be a focus in this simplification process, Griffin says.
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“They are a muddled product with their dual purpose of both saving for a first home and a retirement nest egg,” she says. “Renaming the LISA to something like a “First Home Account” and removing the retirement element could make the product more attractive and easier to understand.”
Jason Hollands, managing director at platform Bestinvest, says one hope is that Reeves reforms LISAs by “both reducing the early withdrawal penalties from 25% to 20% and lifting — or preferably scrapping altogether — the cap on the value of a first property that a Lifetime ISA can be used to purchase”.
He points out that this value has been frozen at £450,000 since the introduction of LISAs back in 2017/18, despite the fact that house prices have risen “significantly” since then, particularly in London and the South East.
While the average house price across the UK stands at £293,399, according to data from Halifax, a home in London now typically costs £539,238.
“The value of a property where a LISA is used towards the purchase has no implications for the Treasury’s coffers and is therefore a pointless restriction,” says Hollands.
Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at platform Hargreaves Lansdown, says that something she would like to see in the budget is allowing investment in long-term asset funds (LTAFs) through stocks and shares ISAs.
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LTAFs are a relatively new type of open-ended fund, having been introduced back in 2021, and allows savers to invest over the long-term in more illiquid assets, such as property, infrastructure and private companies.
“At the moment, investors can’t hold them in stocks and shares ISAs — they’re only allowed in innovative finance ISAs, which are much more niche,” Steeter says.
“Changing ISA rules to them into more mainstream ISAs would open up far more investment — while existing FCA clear rules around the retail distribution of LTAFs ensure they only make up an appropriate portion of someone’s wider portfolio.”
Pensions taxation
Meanwhile, Helen Morrissey, head of retirement analysis at Hargreaves Lansdown and Yahoo Finance UK’s pensions columnist, hopes for “urgent clarity” on the tax-free lump sums people can take from their pensions.
“Uncertainty is doing nobody any good, and raises the risk that people will panic, take tax-free cash and end up in a worse position,” she says.
Morrissey explains that switching money to cash savings and removing it from a tax-efficient environment could “devastate the returns they need later in retirement”.
Craig Rickman, pensions expert at platform Interactive Investor, says he’d like to see the current pension taxation regime “left alone”.
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“Savers need consistency in the pensions framework to plan for their retirements with confidence, which could be dented if the goalposts are moved,” he says.
Rickman also wants to see some clarity on the future of the state pension, as it “remains the subject of intense speculation”.
He says that the government faces big decisions during this parliament, including whether to raise the state pension age to 68. While he notes that the state pension may not be enough to rely on in retirement, it still provides a “valuable foundation to meet day-to-day expenditure”.
“It would be great if Labour could use its first budget to outline its plans for the state pension and provide some much-needed clarity,” Rickman says.
These calls for clarity seem to be the overriding message from investment and pensions experts ahead of the budget, as well as the desire to see some more simplification of financial products, to help give savers more confidence to keep their money invested for the long-term.
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