ISSUE NO. 20 · FRIDAY 28 AUGUST 2026

The department checking the poorest pensions, a Chancellor promising relief he may not be able to fund, and £35,000 that appeared in a London deposit without a single price moving

761,000. That is how many pensioners are eligible for Pension Credit and have never claimed it. The DWP has spent this week writing to people who did claim, asking to see their bank statements. Both numbers are real. Only one of them is being chased.

It is the same shape as everything else below. Andy Burnham has promised to ease the cost of doing business without saying what he can afford, and the two credible estimates of his room are £15bn and £8bn. A London buyer needs £35,000 more for a deposit than in January, and not one house got more expensive to produce it. The gap between what is promised and what the arithmetic allows is where all three of today’s stories live.

Below in full: the pension review that polices the smaller error, the Budget promise with no figure attached, and why a mortgage rate move shows up as a deposit problem. After those, the numbers, the diary — with a bank holiday in it — and one calculator worth five minutes.

Lead

Pension Credit tops up the poorest retirements in Britain. The DWP now wants to see the bank statements behind the claim.

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 enough: overpaid claims reached 33 per cent in the 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 that is a number the review does not touch at all. 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 is a strange order of priorities — it polices the smaller error and leaves the larger one alone, and it does so among the households least equipped to answer a letter asking for their bank statements. Read the full story →

The Numbers

Nothing new in the official figures this week. Bank Rate is 3.75% into the 17 September decision, CPI is still July’s 2.9%, and real pay is 1.4% on the June readings, with pay growth at 4.0% against 2.6% inflation that month. The index below is where the movement was, giving up 0.79% on Thursday and falling back to 118 points off its twelve-month high.

More News

£15bn, or £8bn. Those are the rival estimates of the room Burnham has at the 28 October Budget.

City economists put the fiscal headroom at around £15bn; the Resolution Foundation lands closer to £8bn, and the gap between the two decides whether a promise to ease the cost of doing business survives contact with the public finances. The pressure behind that promise is not abstract: the British Chambers of Commerce reckons policy has pushed business costs up by about 70 per cent over the last decade, which is the figure firms will hold him to. A trade meeting with the European Union is expected in November, after the Budget rather than before it, so whatever is announced on 28 October will be set without knowing what that meeting produces. Burnham has offered warmth without figures, and warmth is free. The hard part arrives on 28 October, when the Treasury finds out which estimate was closer to the truth. Read the full story →

A London buyer who waited out the spring is £35,000 worse off, and no house changed price to do it.

UK mortgage rates have moved from below four per cent in January to about 4.8 per cent, and because the deposit scales with the size of the loan a lender will write, that move alone has added £35,000 to the average London deposit. The same shift costs a North East buyer £10,200 more — smaller in cash, identical in mechanism. The market is behaving exactly as you would expect when interest outruns affordability: search traffic is seven per cent higher than a year ago while sales agreed are six per cent lower, which is the signature of people who want to move and cannot. It is worth being clear about what this is. The deposit gap is a rate problem wearing a housing problem’s clothes, and a stamp duty cut would help at the margin while leaving the buyer facing the same monthly repayment on a smaller loan. Read the full story →

On the Diary

• Today, 9.30am BST — Household Costs Indices for UK household groups, April to June 2026. Inflation as different households actually experience it, which is where a single 2.9% headline stops being one number.
• Today, 9.30am BST — Quarterly personal well-being statistics, August 2026. The ONS read on how people say they are doing, published the same morning as the cost figures above and worth reading against them.
• Monday is the summer bank holiday, so nothing lands until Tuesday, 9.30am BST — Mergers and acquisitions involving UK companies, April to June 2026. The quarterly read on how much of corporate Britain changed hands in the second quarter, and to whom.

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.

Mortgage affordability calculator

“If a rate move can add £35,000 to a deposit without a single price changing, the number worth knowing is what a lender will actually lend you today — not what it would have lent in January.”

The Close

Three stories, one shape. In each of them something was promised and the arithmetic quietly declined to co-operate. Pension Credit promises to top up the poorest retirements, and 761,000 people who qualify never see a penny of it. Burnham promises relief for business, and cannot yet say whether he has £15bn or £8bn to fund it. The housing market is told a stamp duty cut would help, when the £35,000 came from the Bank of England rather than the Treasury. None of that is dishonesty. It is that promises are made in words and settled in numbers, and the settling happens later, usually to somebody who was not in the room when the promise was made. The Budget on 28 October is the next settlement date.

Have a good bank holiday weekend. The Briefing is back on Tuesday.

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

MJB