彭博：英国财相Healey或在10月28日预算中全面恢复银行附加税至8%，与英央行行长Bailey立场相左

Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey’s plan to raise bank taxes may help ease Britain’s strained public finances, but risks an awkward difference of opinion with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey.

Healey could reverse a move by the previous Conservative government in 2023 that cut the UK’s bank surcharge on corporation tax, lowering it to 3% from 8%. Fully reversing the cut would raise £3 billion ($4 billion) according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

The chancellor and BOE governor have both been at the IMF-World Bank meetings in Bangkok this week, where it was late Thursday night when reports emerged of the possible tax hike. On Friday morning the story dominated the front page of more than one British newspaper.

“It’s not for me. I’m not involved. It’s for the Treasury,” Bailey said Friday morning, when asked about the proposal at an Institute of International Finance meeting.

Earlier this year, however, Bailey warned UK politicians that any move to penalize lenders would simply result in higher mortgage rates and risk undermining financial stability.

In June, he told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee “mortgages will cost more and payments on deposits will be less” if interest paid to lenders by the central bank is cut. Bailey has argued that reducing such “interest on reserves” payments is equivalent to a bank tax.

Bailey has argued that bank taxes, or the near equivalent of cutting “interest on reserve” payments to UK lenders, pose a threat to financial stability. Banks failed to cover their cost of capital for over a decade after the financial crisis and have only returned to health in the last three years.

Read More: Bailey Defends Banks Against Calls to Tax Profits From QE

He told the Lords committee in June that shareholders will not give banks the capital to support growth or prop up their balance sheets if they don’t make returns. “That is the basis on which the shareholders are prepared to provide the funding,” he said.

In separate comments to the House of Commons’ Treasury Select Committee the following month, he said there are a lot of complaints about how much the UK banks are earning, but “they have to earn their cost of capital. They are doing that, which is a sign of their resilience.”

“We will not get growth if we do not have financial stability.”

A possible bank tax has been on the cards since Prime Minister Andy Burnham took power in July, appointing Healey as his chancellor. Healey described the City of London’s finance industry as “part of the jewel” in the UK’s economic crown during an interview with Bloomberg in the Thai capital on Thursday, yet also stressed the need to robust public finances.

A rise in borrowing costs linked to the US-Iran war is estimated to have halved the £23.6 billion fiscal buffer that Healey inherited from former Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Profits

Bailey’s views are, unsurprisingly, shared in the financial industry. Wim Mijs, chief executive of the European Banking Federation, told Bloomberg at the IIF meeting a tax on UK banks would simply be passed on and “end up somewhere in the economy.” While the tax would raise money for the exchequer it is “not an effective way of stimulating growth,” he said.

UK banks have been under scrutiny because of the profits they are making, largely as a result of higher interest rates that reflect elevated inflation due to the Iran war. Think tanks and unions have likened them to “windfall” profits and called for them to be taxed. The big four UK lenders — HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and Natwest — are set to make around £60 billion in combined pretax profit for 2027-2028 according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Industry groups such as UK Finance counter that they are already highly taxed. In 2024/25, banks paid £8.8 billion in corporation tax, another £1 billion in the corporation tax surcharge and a further £1.3 billion in the bank levy, a tax on a lender’s balance sheet, according to the House of Commons library. A further £35.2 billion was raised from taxes on staff wages.

The bank surcharge was reduced to 3% from 8% in 2023 to offset some of the increase in corporation tax that year to 25% from 19%. That left UK banks paying 28% rather than 33%, which would have made them more highly taxed them elsewhere.

British bank bosses and Jamie Dimon, the JP Morgan chief executive, have been lobbying Healey not to raise taxes to keep London internationally competitive. Dimon has even suggested he could pull plans for a £10 billion tower in Canary Wharf that would be its European headquarters.

UK Finance said the sector already makes a major contribution to the public finances and faces materially higher tax rates in London than other financial centers. “Further tax increases would weaken the UK’s competitiveness, discourage investment and job creation, and work against the government’s ambition to deliver growth in every postcode.”