We’re now on the home straight for the Budget which will, no doubt, come as something of a relief to advisers. This week’s pre-Budget bad news, which is well sourced because it’s the Financial Times, firms up the idea the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will cap the amount of salary that can be sacrificed at £2,000.
The pink paper also suggests the move will raise between £3bn to £4bn from additional NI. Quite a hit to pensions, and probably a bad reputation to develop as Chancellor, though most don’t think Reeves will stay in post to deliver another Budget.
There is some lobbying against the move. The FT reports that almost a third of UK businesses will cut staff pension payments if the chancellor caps salary sacrifice contributions at the £2,000 level, according to the Reward and Employee Benefits Association (REBA) in a survey of 300 human resources directors.
Rathbones have done a bit of digging around the threshold freeze with a Freedom of Information request showing that nearly 2.3 million people are expected to earn more than £100,000 a year by 2028–29, pulling hundreds of thousands of families into the UK’s highest marginal tax band and risking the loss of childcare benefits worth thousands of pounds. Money Marketing reports.
Citywire New Model Adviser has done one of its important analyses of adviser fees.
Combining data from the 2025 Top 100 firms and the FCA shows an overwhelming preference towards percentage charging, with a clustering to 1% and 0.75% for ongoing advice.
Now your reviewer suspects that advisers are yet to see a great deal of benefit from the FCA’s new, lighter approach to regulation. However, some nvestment firms are set to benefit.
Money Marketing reports big concessions on MiFID reporting.
The report suggests that the current annual cost of MiFID transaction reporting to the industry is £493m. The FCA says the following measures will save £100m.
Removing foreign exchange derivatives from reporting requirements, reducing costs for over 400 firms.
Removing reporting requirements for six million financial instruments including equities, bonds and certain derivatives that are only traded on EU trading venues.
Reducing the period for correcting historic reporting errors from five to three years, lowering the number of transaction reports that need to be resubmitted by a third.
Big stuff if you manage money.
Here’s an interesting weekend blog from UBS’s chief economist Paul Donovan. He suggests that given Bitcoin’s recent falls, the digital currency is effectively suffering from 800% inflation.
