ISSUE NO. 21 · TUESDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 2026

The week in review — a demographic bill nobody has costed, a land tax killed inside a week, and a department asking the poorest pensioners for their bank statements

The Budget is 57 days away, and last week was the week Britain started arguing about who pays for it. Three different answers surfaced, none of them compatible. Ben Ansell put the long bill at about 10 per cent of GDP by 2075. Andy Burnham killed a land value tax within days of taking office. The DWP began writing to Pension Credit claimants asking to see their bank accounts.

Read together they describe a country that agrees the arithmetic and cannot agree the payer. The three biggest stories are below, rewritten shorter, followed by everything else from the week in one list. Then the numbers, the week ahead, and one calculator.

The Week’s Biggest Story

Pensions and health will add about 10 per cent of GDP to the tax burden by 2075. Almost nobody is arguing about it.

Ben Ansell’s report for the IPPR builds on Office for Budget Responsibility projections running to 2075. Of that 10 per cent, the state pension is roughly three percentage points, much of it from the uprating guarantee alone; old-age benefits could reach £181bn by 2030 on current projections. Demographic change does two-thirds of the work by 2050 and four-fifths by 2075, with the over-65s passing a quarter of the population against roughly 18 per cent today. Ansell wants the money moved out of income and into wealth deliberately rather than by stealth: council tax and stamp duty scrapped for a proportional property tax at 0.65 per cent, capital gains rates raised to match income tax, and a two per cent national insurance surcharge on pensioners. The last of those is the one that will generate the noise, and the one that tests whether a new fiscal contract means anything. Read the full story →

A £2.6m family home pays a shade over £4,000 in council tax. Under a land value tax it would pay £30,534.

Burnham shut the idea down within days of taking office, and it will be back, because every alternative is either smaller or more painful. Equalising capital gains tax with income tax would raise around £14bn a year against receipts that already hit a record £22.2bn in 2025/26. Extending national insurance to investment, property and pension income would raise some £22bn. Both are real money and both are politically brutal in a way a levy on land is not, because land cannot be moved, hidden or taken offshore. What the £30,534 figure exposes is the distance between what a home is worth and what it is currently charged on. Burnham has bought one Budget of quiet rather than a settlement. Read the full story →

The DWP wants to see the bank statements behind the claim. 761,000 eligible pensioners never made one.

Letters are landing with thousands of claimants, and the department will not say how many people it picked or how it picked them. The case for looking is real: overpaid claims reached 33 per cent last tax year, up from 28 per cent, with the average overpayment around £1,400, and the target is £370m recovered by April 2031. Set against it is the number the review does not touch. Roughly 761,000 eligible pensioners have never claimed Pension Credit, a benefit worth up to £9,665 once the extras are counted. Reviewing claims is defensible; doing it while three-quarters of a million people miss out entirely polices the smaller error and leaves the larger one alone. Read the full story →

The Brief

Everything else published last week, in the order it ran.

• Burnham Promises Relief as Firms Brace for a Raid — £15bn or £8bn of headroom, and a Budget on 28 October.
• London Buyers Now Need £35,000 More for a Deposit — a rate move, not a price move.
• £125bn Loss Puts Bank of England Bond Sales in Doubt — the only major central bank still actively selling.
• The Best Day to Buy an IPO Is Not Day One — who actually collects the 18 to 19 per cent pop.
• European Private Credit Hits Record £54.1bn — a record built mostly on refinancing.
• KPMG Audit Scandal Costs 360 Jobs and 27 Partners — audit revenue rose 11 per cent anyway.
• Treasury Reopens Hospitality Business Rates Valuations — the bill pubs and restaurants have been waiting on.
• HMRC Sends Mansion Tax Inspectors Into Your Home — 165,000 homes to be visited.
• The Economy Rebounded. UK Job Losses Did Not Stop. — growth and hiring pulling apart.
• Morrisons Debt Will Decide the Big Four Comeback — £7.5bn of net debt against a recovery.
• Graduate Job Market Hits Record Low as AI Moves In — vacancies down 45.6 per cent in a year.

The Numbers

The official figures barely moved. Bank Rate is 3.75% into the 17 September decision, CPI is still July’s 2.9%, unemployment has sat at 4.9% since March and real pay is 1.4% on the June readings. The markets did the moving: the FTSE 100 was 70 points up on the week by Tuesday, 24 points down by Thursday, and finished 7.7 points ahead of where it started. The FTSE 250 closed Friday at a twelve-month high.

The Week Ahead

• Today, 9.30am BST — Mergers and acquisitions involving UK companies, April to June 2026. How much of corporate Britain changed hands in the second quarter, and to whom.
• Wednesday, 9.30am BST — Working and workless households in the UK, April to June 2026. The household-level read on the labour market, which is where a record-low graduate market eventually shows up.
• Thursday, 9.30am BST — Business insights and impact on the UK economy. The fortnightly survey of what firms are actually reporting, seven weeks out from the Budget.
• Friday, 9.30am BST — Economic activity and social change in the UK, real-time indicators. The fastest series the ONS publishes, and the closest thing to a live look at spending.

The Toolbox

One tool from the site each issue, picked to fit what has just happened. Free, no sign-up, and it shows its workings.

Capital gains tax calculator

“Equalising capital gains with income tax was on the table twice last week, from two different directions. Fifty-seven days before a Budget is a sensible moment to know what you would actually pay.”

The Close

Put last week’s three biggest stories side by side and you get the whole argument in miniature. The bill is enormous and largely uncontested — nobody spent the week disputing Ansell’s arithmetic. The largest single idea for paying it was ruled out inside a few days, not because it does not work but because land is where votes live. And while that was happening, the part of the state that actually went looking for money went looking in the bank accounts of people on the smallest incomes in the country. That is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when the big decisions are politically expensive and the small ones are not: the effort flows to where the resistance is weakest. Fifty-seven days to the Budget, and the shape of it is already visible in which arguments got had and which got closed down.

If something here is wrong, or there is something you want dug into, just reply. It comes straight to me.

MJB