The Money Brief #14 - 20 July 2026

This morning, Britain gets its seventh Prime Minister in a decade. As you read this, Andy Burnham is on his way to becoming PM, a war in the Middle East has re-ignited, and your mortgage is quietly caught between the two. This week I want to show you how a change at the top, a spike in the oil price and a frozen tax band all end up in the same place: your monthly budget. Grab your Monday coffee. Let me translate.

Here is the news you already know: Britain has a new Prime Minister. Andy Burnham was confirmed as Labour leader on Friday, unopposed and with a record share of his party’s support, and he takes over from Keir Starmer today. He is the country’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade.

We do not do party politics here, so let me stick to what matters for your money. In his first speech, Burnham promised to put the cost of living “front and centre” of his government. So what might that actually mean for your wallet?

The one to watch is an idea he has long supported: scrapping council tax and stamp duty, and replacing them both with a single annual “proportional property tax” charged on what your home is worth. The version he has previously backed would charge 0.48% of your property’s value each year.

Here is what that looks like in real money.

The average UK home, worth about £270,000, would pay roughly £1,300 a year, against the current average council tax bill of £2,392.

Put simply, homes worth less than about £500,000 would mostly pay less than they do now, while more expensive homes, second homes and homes in London and the South East would pay more. Supporters say around 18 million households would be better off.

A big and important caveat: this is not government policy. It is an idea Burnham has supported, not a plan he has announced, with no detail, no costing and no timeline, and it would need a proper mandate to happen. We are showing you the maths behind what fiscal opportunities our next PM might explore in his time in office, not predicting your next council tax bill.

And here is the thing that will move your money faster than any of it: who he picks as chancellor. The chancellor sets the country’s tax and spending, and the financial markets watch closely to see whether they will keep government borrowing under control. If markets trust them, the government’s borrowing costs stay low, and so do the mortgage rates that follow. If they do not, borrowing costs can climb within days. We saw exactly that in the 2022 mini-Budget. So the chancellor appointment this week likely matters more to your monthly bills than the man outside Number 10.

Sources: BBC News and Reuters (17 July 2026); Fairer Share, The Negotiator, HomeOwners Alliance (property-tax model).

Two weeks ago in this section, lenders were cutting mortgage rates and brokers were calling it the start of a price war. This week, they threw it into reverse.

Nationwide is raising some of its fixed rates by up to 0.35%. Its two-year fix, for example, goes from 4.19% to 4.54%. Barclays, HSBC and Coventry Building Society are lifting rates too. The trigger is the war. When the Iran ceasefire collapsed, the cost that lenders pay to fund fixed mortgages, known as swap rates, jumped, and mortgage rates followed. As one broker put it, “just as we thought sub-4% fixes were in sight, the trouble in Iran started again.”

Before this reads as alarming, some perspective. Rates are still well below where they spiked earlier this year, and the cheapest deals are still around 4.2% if you have a significant deposit, often 40% (60% Loan to Value mortgages). This is a few weeks’ worth of cuts being handed back, not a return to the crisis levels of 2022. The Bank of England’s base rate has not moved. It is still 3.75%, with the next decision on 30 July.

What it means for you. If your current deal ends in the next six months, this is the kind of week that makes shopping around worthwhile, because the direction has turned. Most lenders let you lock in a new rate up to six months before your deal ends, and switch if something cheaper appears before then. So it may be worth understanding your options sooner rather than later.

Sources: Mortgage Introducer, GB News, BBC (July 2026).

The return of the war has moved two things worth knowing about.

First, oil. Brent crude, the global benchmark, has jumped more than 10% in a week to around $86 a barrel, after the US struck Iranian targets and reimposed a blockade on its ports. Here is the odd part, and it is useful to understand. You might expect the UK stock market to fall on war news. Instead the FTSE 100 has held up. That is because the FTSE is stuffed with giant oil companies like Shell and BP, whose share prices rise when the oil price rises. So the same event that pushes up your petrol can prop up your pension. Markets rarely move the way common sense expects.

Second, the banks. This week the big American banks reported their second-quarter results, and they were staggering. JPMorgan made $21.2 billion in a single quarter, the largest quarterly profit in the history of US banking. Goldman Sachs had its best quarter ever.

Why do banks boom while everyone else feels squeezed? Because their trading desks make money from turbulence. The wild swings in oil, currencies and interest rates that unsettle the rest of us are exactly what those desks profit from. It is worth knowing that JPMorgan’s record was flattered by around $5.6 billion of one-off gains, so it is not quite as superhuman as the headline suggests. Britain’s own big banks report their results later this month, and we will see whether they tell the same story.

For your pension, none of this needs action. It is simply a reminder that a good week for a bank, or even for the index your pension tracks, does not mean a good week for the economy you actually live in.

Sources: IG, Investing.com, Trading Economics; Investing.com, TechTimes (July 2026).

Crypto has grown up a little this month, and it comes with a bill most people do not know about.

First, the news. The UK’s financial regulator, the FCA, has finalised the first proper rulebook for crypto. Under it, the firms you might buy or hold crypto through, the exchanges and custodians, will be held to similar standards as banks, including a duty to treat customers fairly. Sterling “stablecoins” will be jointly watched by the FCA and the Bank of England. Firms can start applying to be authorised from September, with the full regime in place by October 2027. The regulator was honest about the limits, saying it can hold firms to higher standards but “can’t regulate away risk.” Put simply, crypto is being brought inside the tent, slowly.

Second, the part that catches people out: tax. In the UK, HMRC treats crypto as property, not money. That means selling it, swapping one coin for another, or even spending it can count as a “disposal” that triggers Capital Gains Tax on any profit. The useful bit to know is that everyone gets a tax-free allowance first. For this tax year you can make £3,000 of gains across all your assets before any Capital Gains Tax is due. Above that, gains are taxed at 18% if you are a basic-rate taxpayer, or 24% if you are a higher-rate one. And if you earn crypto, through mining or staking rewards or being paid in it, that counts as income and is taxed like income instead. None of this is a reason to buy or sell anything. It is simply worth knowing what you might already owe, and what allowance you have, if you hold any.

If you hold crypto and have sold, swapped or spent any of it in recent years, it is worth knowing that this tax is not taken automatically. Unlike PAYE, nobody calculates it for you. If your gains are within the £3,000 allowance, there is usually nothing to report. Above it, the responsibility to declare is yours, and it is done through HMRC’s Self Assessment system online. A few dates to know, using the tax year that ran from 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026:

If you are not already in Self Assessment, HMRC also has a “real time” Capital Gains service that lets you report a gain without registering for the full system.

For the full rules, gov.uk sets them out for free, and a qualified accountant or tax adviser can help with anything more complicated.

Crypto assets are high-risk and largely unregulated in the UK. Values are extremely volatile. You could lose all the money you invest. This is not investment advice. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.

We mentioned the chancellor in the Big Story. Here is why that job, more than almost any other, reaches into your bank account.

A chancellor does two big things. They decide how much tax the country raises and how much it spends, in the Budget. And they set the “fiscal rules,” the self-imposed limits on how much the government borrows. That last part is where you come in. The government borrows by selling bonds, and the investors who buy them watch the chancellor closely. If those investors trust that borrowing is under control, the interest the government pays stays low. And because your mortgage rates ultimately follow those same market rates, calm in the bond market usually means calmer mortgage rates. Lose that trust, as the government did in the 2022 mini-Budget, and the cost of everything can jump within days.

So the new chancellor is not inheriting a quiet desk. Inflation, the rate at which prices rise, was 2.8% in the year to May, the most recent official figure, due to be updated with June’s CPI figures this week. That is already above the Bank of England’s 2% target, and it is expected to climb further, towards 3.3% later this year and possibly close to 4% by Christmas, largely because the war is pushing energy prices back up. The pain is concentrated where you feel it most: services like haircuts and eating out, and transport, where fuel costs recently rose at their fastest since 2022. The energy price cap has just gone up 13% to £1,862 a year for a typical home, and changes again on 1 October.

There is one bright spot, for balance. Food price inflation has eased to 2.2%, its lowest since December 2024, so the weekly shop is at least rising more slowly than it was.

One date for your diary: the next official inflation figure lands this Wednesday, so the new chancellor’s first few days come with a fresh read on prices. We will cover how they plan to handle it and what it means next week.

Sources: ONS (Consumer Price Inflation, to May 2026; June figure due 22 July); House of Commons Library; Bank of England; Ofgem.

You will have seen the phrase “fiscal drag” in the headlines this week. It sounds like jargon, and it is, so let me translate it, because it is quietly costing millions of people money.

Normally, the income tax thresholds, the point where you start paying tax and the point where the higher 40% rate kicks in, are nudged up a little each year to keep pace with rising prices, so that inflation alone does not push you into paying a higher rate. Since 2021, the government has frozen them instead. The personal allowance has been stuck at £12,570 and the higher-rate threshold at £50,270 for five years. And they had barely moved for years before that: back in 2019 they were £12,500 and £50,000. In practice, these lines have stayed roughly still for seven years.

Here is why that matters. As your pay rises over time, even just to keep up with inflation, the thresholds do not rise to meet it. So more of your income slips into higher tax bands. Your tax rate has not gone up by a single penny. You simply pay more of it. That is fiscal drag, and it is why people call it a “stealth tax.”

The numbers are striking. The number of people paying the 40% higher rate has jumped from 4.4 million five years ago to a projected 7.7 million this year. That is over three million more people, many of them on salaries that do not feel remotely wealthy. The number paying the top 45% rate (earners over £125,000 per year) has more than doubled.

And the figure that really lands it: if those thresholds had simply risen with inflation as they normally would, you would not start paying 40% tax until nearly £70,000, instead of £50,270 today. That gap is the stealth tax, in one number. It means nearly £20,000 of earnings that would have been taxed at the basic 20% rate is being taxed at 40% instead. For someone earning £70,000 today, that is close to £4,000 a year in extra tax, or around £330 a month.

This is not a party point. The freeze was introduced by one chancellor, extended by the next, and extended again by the current one, across both main parties. By the time the current freeze is due to end in 2031, these thresholds will have been held still for a decade, through some of the highest inflation in forty years. It has quietly become one of the biggest tax changes in a generation, precisely because almost nobody voted on it or noticed it. Next time, we will look at how the same freeze is now starting to pull the state pension into the tax net too.

Sources: HMRC Income Tax statistics (July 2026); House of Commons Library.

That is your five minutes, on a morning with rather a lot in it.

If a friend is confused about what a new Prime Minister means for their money, or worried about that “40% tax” headline, forward this on. Clear beats loud.

Coming up: the Bank of England’s next interest rate decision on 30 July, Britain’s own big banks reporting their results, and that fresh inflation figure this Wednesday. Plus, my 2026 student loan statement should land any day now, and I will show you exactly what a year of payments did to it.

Look after your money. It is on your side more than you think.

Follow us between briefs for mid-week updates and the data points worth knowing:

Thank you,

Ellis

themoneybrief.co.uk

The Money Brief. Not financial advice. The Money Brief provides news and commentary for informational purposes only. We are not FCA-regulated. Crypto and investments can go down as well as up. Always consult a qualified adviser before making financial decisions.

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