UK bank shares have jumped as investors grow increasingly confident that the industry will be shielded from tax rises in Rachel Reeves’s budget this week.
Shares in some of the UK’s largest high street lenders rose more than 2% on Tuesday, after reports that the Treasury had asked the sector to issue supportive statements about the following day’s budget, raising expectations they would be spared a further levy.
Lloyds rose by 3.8%, NatWest went up 3.7% and Barclays added 2.3%.
“Reports that UK banks might get a reprieve in this week’s budget from previously floated new tax measures … underpinned the FTSE 100’s rise on Tuesday,” said Dan Coatsworth, the head of markets at AJ Bell.
“It suggests that some intense lobbying by the industry has paid off, although U-turns have been a theme in UK politics for some time so banking boardrooms may not breathe a full sigh of relief until Rachel Reeves has sat down tomorrow afternoon.”
Speculation over potential bank tax rises has been swirling for months, having been revived in August when the IPPR thinktank argued that Reeves should levy a new bank tax to claw back money that commercial lenders earn from the Bank of England as result of an emergency economic policy known as quantitative easing put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.
The banking industry lobbied hard against a tax increase, arguing that banks in the UK were paying a total tax rate of about 45.8% when employment taxes and VAT were taken into account. That compared with a 38.6% rate in Frankfurt and 27.9% in New York.
Bosses also argued that a tax rise could force them to curb lending and cancel out the benefits of the chancellor’s Leeds reforms, which were launched this summer with the aim of spurring growth by cutting the regulatory burden for banks and the UK’s wider financial sector.
Banks felt they had largely won the argument until it emerged earlier this month that the Treasury had abandoned plans to increase income tax rates in what would amount to a breach of Labour’s manifesto pledge. The Guardian understands that as recently as last week, the Treasury had left some banks fearing a sector-specific tax was back on the cards.
A story overnight by the Financial Times, suggesting the Treasury had asked for positive soundings in the budget amid expectation they would be spared a tax raid, has again eased those fears.
However, Labour MPs and campaign groups including Positive Money have continued to push for tax rises. Positive Money said it had gathered 68,749 signatures supporting a windfall tax on bank profits. It claimed that a 38% charge, on par with the windfall tax applied to energy companies, could bring in more than £14bn for Treasury coffers.
Simon Opher, the Labour MP for Stroud who is helping deliver the petition to Downing Street, said: “This week’s budget is an opportunity to restore the public services that form the backbone of our society, but are no longer working for ordinary people after years of being cut to the bone.
“Recouping the huge payments that are being made from the public to the banking sector is a fair and commonsense way to fund this, and will only strengthen our economy by allowing us to invest more in health, education and communities.
“I urge the government to listen to the thousands of members of the public who have signed this petition and are calling to make our economy fairer.”
