Rachel Reeves Autumn Budget 2025

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Anyone care to guess what will be in it?

I wont hold it against anyone who gets it wrong!

If pensioners have to pay tax how will she enable 8million people to use the online HMRC website to put in a tax return??
what she should do is hit everyone - rich,pensioners, corporations then no one can feel hard done by

A load of nonsense spinning more tax rises due to getting it so wrong last time.

The standard Labour lines on everything.

A reduction in the amount that people can get tax relief on for pension contributions (from £60k to say £40k)

This would be a good one. Better off people are using this to avoid a lot of tax.

On public sector 'efficiency' they'd do best to scrap all the arrangements that add cost and private sector contractors profit hugely from.

So instead of just booking travel online and claiming it back I have to fill in a form, have it approved by a senior manager, even though it's a routine part of my work and then have an admin person book it via an external agency that adds on average 30% to the price I found when I looked to see what time the flight/train was or chose a hotel near where I needed to be.

See also asylum seeker hotels, which has made a billionaire out of the owner of Britiannia hotels renting out his run down dirty hotels to the government to house asylum seekers.

Also PPE contracts, PFI, all the facilities companies like G4S, Serco etc etc. All making billions from badly serviced public sector contracts where they charge huge amounts for simple things like changing lightbulbs.

No need, for the majority, employers, banks (for savings) and pension providers just report to HMRC and tax and NI is worked out by adjusting tax codes. Only those with income from self employment, property or capital gains etc need to do a tax return.

many pensioners do pay tax. And many are already submitting tax returns.

There are changes underway for making Hmrc more digital.

I don't think tax on State Pension can come out of PAYE if you have no other income, you have to do a simple assessment.

Good point!

Hadnt even crossed my mind that there might be anything "nice" in it.

I think reducing the amount people can pay into pensions would drive the wrong behaviour. I'm one of those people and I'll simply reduce my hours if my work will allow. I pay and have paid a huge amount of tax and NI and been consistently impacted by whatever the next way to plug the hole is. Fed up of being targeted and I won't be working any more for the benefit of others. (And I strongly believe in the welfare state, just not the abuse of it)

Pension tax relief rules are no more unfair than claiming it is unfair that lower earners pay a lower % of income tax than higher earners.

I agree. Most people who pay high amounts into pensions have done so to avoid crippling marginal tax rates. In many cases a reduction of the max annual amount from 60k to 40k would result in people having to pay 60% + NI on the money if taken as cash salary. When that happens many choose to reduce working hours instead. That results in no additional tax being paid and in the long run less in paid as pension pots will be smaller and thereby attract less tax on withdrawal. We should never be encouraging people to save less.

What I would like to see is a sensible increase in the rate of income tax (so the burden rests on all tax payers) alongside a shift upwards in thresholds for paying tax so that those who earn the least are properly insulated.

What I expect to see is another fudge that fucks things up even more for those in the middle and small business owners.

I have no expectation they’ll go after the actually wealthy.

Even worse for someone with nursery age children on let’s say 159k who currently pays 60k into their pension pot.

If the limit was reduced to 40k that wouldn’t just be a loss of pension tax relief, it would be a complete loss off the entire 20k due to high marginal rate of income tax plus the loss of funded childcare hours and tax free childcare.

Putting an additional 20k tax burden on higher earning parents of young children who already pay huge amounts does not feel
right to me. The system should incentivise such people to work more not less.

Terrrrrrified by this Wednesday.

Can’t stand her or labour they are ruining our country

Completely agree. Also, the headline reason for raising the amount to £60k was because the way that the annual allowance is calculated for defined benefit pensions was causing real problems for some public sector workers. In particular, consultant doctors were being hit with tax bills for going over the allowance in ways they couldn't predict or control. The only sensible thing for then to do was to cut down on how much they were working.

Disincentivising higher earners from working is absurd.

They could have dealt with the doctor issue by excluding standard DB pensions, which have a notional value that can approach or even exceed the lifetime allowance as was, even without extra contributions or a particularly high salary.

I earn nowhere near what a doctor earns but my civil service pension 'value' which I won't see most of unless I live into my 90s, is well over £0.5M.

That's true but also seems hideously unfair to non-public sector workers, who would be having their pension contributions restricted and tax increased, while paying for pensions they could only dream of.