Autumn budget Archives - Financial Planning in Surrey

Autumn Budget 2025 (Latest Announcement)

Matt Loadwick
Sept 2025 • 2 min read

Autumn Budget 2025 (Latest Announcement)

The Treasury has announced that this year’s Autumn Budget will be delivered on 26^th November.

The chancellor makes a budget statement each year to MPs in the House of Commons, which presents the Government’s fiscal plans; stating which taxes will be raised (or lowered), and where public spending will be focused – on areas such as health, schools, transport and other public services.

Last year, this Labour Government’s first budget in office brought about some significant changes to taxation, including: announcing proposals to bring pensions into the estate for IHT purposes as of April 2027, increasing Capital Gains Tax rates to 18% & 24% (from 10% & 20%), increasing employer National Insurance Contributions, and lowering the threshold at which Stamp Duty Land Tax is paid for first time buyers from £425,000 to £300,000.

This year’s budget comes against the backdrop of a difficult economic landscape, with the cost of government borrowing reaching a 27-year high on the 2^nd September. The interest rate paid on 30-year gilts (bonds), referred to as the gilt yield, reached 5.72%, increasing the costs of borrowing for the government. This has led to criticism being levelled at Chancellor Rachel Reeves for her management of the economy, however it should be recognised that the UK is not alone in seeing borrowing costs rise, with costs also rising to their highest levels since 2011 on 30-year bonds in France, Germany and the Netherlands. There are various factors affecting global borrowing costs, such as Trump’s trade policies, geopolitical uncertainty and conflict.

The options for this Government are made more difficult by their pre-election pledges not to increase taxes for working people, whilst attempts to balance the books through welfare spending cuts were shown to be incredibly difficult to get past Labour MPs. It is therefore expected that some tax rises will be announced in the upcoming budget, but the Chancellor is going to have to be creative if she is to stick to her ‘rules’.

We’ll be keeping an eye on further news as it emerges in the coming weeks, and, as we do every year, the team at Solomon’s will be watching the budget announcement live on 26^th November. We’ll subsequently be keeping you fully informed on any announcements that affect your financial planning.

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Recycling: The possibilities are not endless

Daniel Liddicott
Aug 2024 • 3 min read

Recycling: The possibilities are not endless

There has been a great deal of speculation on potential changes to pension rules, amongst others, as we lead up to Labour’s Autumn Budget on 30^th October. However, one rule that we do not expect to change is the ability to take 25% of your pension pot as a tax-free lump sum.

Whilst Sir Keir Starmer did insinuate during the pre-election process that this current tax-free cash entitlement may not be safe from alteration, it was fairly swiftly followed by various Labour spokespeople claiming that this was “an old-fashioned mistake”. It does not appear therefore that this will change – after all, removing the 25% tax-free lump sum entitlement from pensions would be something akin to political suicide.

So, with this likely to remain for the foreseeable future, it is a good time to remind you of the rules on ‘recycling’ the tax-free cash from your pensions. Recycling in this instance is the act of paying any tax-free cash taken from your pension back into the same or another pension in order to benefit from additional tax relief. There are rules in place to prevent people from exploiting this loophole; otherwise it would be possible to repeatedly withdraw tax-free money from a pension and reinvest it to unfairly boost your pension savings.

When might you break pension tax-free cash recycling rules?

In order to break these recycling rules, ALL of the following must have occurred:

You must have received tax-free cash from a pension
Received more than £7,500 in tax-free cash over 12 months
As a result, pension contributions must have increased by more than 30% of what was expected (e.g., you paid in £10,000 each year before and are now paying in more than £13,000)
The additional amount you are contributing must be more than 30% of the tax-free lump sum received (e.g., you received £30,000 in tax-free cash and are now paying £9,000 or more into pensions)
The recycling was pre-planned

If only one of the above did not occur, you will not have been deemed to have broken the rules.

If all five points had occurred, you will have been deemed to have broken these rules and would likely be forced to pay tax on what would have otherwise been a tax-free lump sum.

In reality, it is not easy to hit all of the above criteria and break the recycling rules. However, it is useful to be aware of these rules to help to avoid paying unnecessary tax on those precious tax-free lump sums from your pensions. We are also, of course, here to help you to avoid such pitfalls. Please get in touch should you have any concerns about the above.

In direct contrast to, and to paraphrase a national TV advertisement campaign from the early 2000s, the message here is this – “Recycling: The possibilities are not endless.”

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