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The Budget looms not a week hence, and already Chancellor Healey has given the wealthy of this Kingdom cause to exhale. This Author notes, with the particular relish one reserves for political pirouettes, that Chancellor Healey has firmly declined to raise Capital Gains Tax – that charming levy upon the profits of the propertied class – despite the spirited lobbying of sundry members of the Progressive Assembly. The reasoning, one is told, is quite straightforward: raise the rate, and the rich shall simply pack their trunks and depart for sunnier fiscal climes, taking their money with them. One can hardly blame them. The Chancellor wishes to see the Kingdom as a nation of wealth creation – a sentiment so unobjectionable that one wonders why it required announcing at all.
Cabinet ministers Lord Streeting and Louise Haigh had both, in earlier and more revolutionary moods, championed the increase. Now they find themselves quietly on the wrong side of the ledger. The Royal Exchequer’s own figures, it seems, suggest that raising the higher rate by ten percentage points could cost the Treasury some £3.6 billion by 2028. When the mathematics themselves counsel restraint, even the most ardent redistributionist must set down his cudgel. Next week’s Budget promises to be a very great deal of fuss about whatever remains.
Meanwhile, Lord Burnham has trained his reforming eye upon that most vexing corner of modern life: the private car park. Seventeen million penalty tickets were issued in the year 2025 to 2026 – a figure so staggering that This Author was briefly tempted to lie down. The Prime Minister has declared that drivers shall henceforth enjoy a guaranteed five minutes to decide whether to park, a ten-minute window to depart without penalty, and immunity from charges caused by broken ticket machines, medical emergencies, or the simple human failing of forgetting a single digit of one’s registration. One woman, the dispatch reveals, was hauled before a court in a claim worth £1,906 for lingering more than five minutes at a Derby car park. The charge was eventually dropped – though the affront to dignity, one suspects, lingers still.
Motoring groups have welcomed the reforms whilst observing that more remains to be done. This Author would merely note that any civilisation which generates £4.6 million worth of car park fines on a single average day has perhaps misplaced its priorities. Parking, it transpires, is where this nation has chosen to make its stand.
To more sombre matters. The Grand Assembly is today presented with regulations that would strip serious criminals – killers and grave offenders detained in hospital under court order – of the universal credit payments they continue to receive whilst the National Health Society funds their bed and board. The loophole has been denounced as a “double provision”, and with considerable justice. Emma Webber, whose son Barnaby Webber was among those stabbed to death in the Nottingham attacks of June 2023 by Valdo Calocane, has described the change as a “no-brainer” – and called on ministers to reallocate the freed funds with all urgency. The government estimates the measure will save tens of millions of pounds per year.
That this reform has taken so long to materialise is the detail that should give every Gentle Reader pause. The families of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and Ian Coates have pursued this cause with quite extraordinary fortitude. Emma Webber met Lord McFadden only this Monday to press the case. Regulations, one trusts, will follow with more haste than comfort has previously been afforded to those who deserved it most.
In Newport, in the Principality, a school bus bound for Ysgol Gyfun Gwent Is Coed met a railway bridge this very Tuesday morning in a collision that removed, with considerable thoroughness, the entire roof of the double-decker vehicle. Three children have been taken to hospital, their injuries mercifully not thought to be life-threatening. The bridge at Maindee West was left in sufficiently uncertain condition that train services between Newport and Hereford were disrupted for several hours, the line requiring inspection before traffic could resume. This Author trusts the children recover swiftly and completely – and gently suggests that whoever plans school bus routes in Newport might usefully acquaint himself with the height of local railway bridges before the next school day begins.
Finally, a dispatch that perfectly captures the peculiar fragility of modern financial life. Revolut – that most digital of banks, boasting some eighty million customers across the globe – suffered an outage this Tuesday morning that rendered card payments, transfers, and cash machine withdrawals unavailable to an unknowable number of its devotees. The company assured all who would listen that customers’ money and data remained entirely safe, which is precisely the reassurance one gives when one wishes to prevent panic. Lloyds Bank and the Bank of Scotland found themselves touched by similar afflictions, though a Lloyds spokesman maintained his institution’s application was “functioning normally” whilst simultaneously acknowledging that some customers were experiencing difficulties. Both things, apparently, true at once. The digital age, Gentle Reader, has given us banks we carry in our pockets – and occasional mornings when those pockets are entirely empty.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.