LONDON — Britain’s government has launched an investigation into how details of a planned bank tax increase were reported before Finance Minister John Healey announced them in his budget last month, according to a letter published by parliament’s Treasury Committee on Tuesday.
Hours before Healey’s October 28 budget, Bloomberg reported that it would include a temporary bank tax rise of less than 8%, lower than lenders had feared. The report sent bank shares rallying before the chancellor’s formal statement.
In a letter to the Treasury Committee, Treasury Permanent Secretary James Bowler said he had been assured that no banks, their representatives or trade bodies were briefed on the changes before Healey’s announcement. He said, however, that there was a “necessary widening” of the circle of knowledge within government immediately before the budget.
Treasury Committee chair Meg Hillier said she suspected the inquiry would find no evidence of a breach. “We cannot continue to accept this doom-loop of dead-end investigations in which everybody in the Treasury throws their hands up in despair, but nobody is ever found to have done anything wrong,” she said. Hillier said she would press for answers when Healey appears before the committee on Wednesday.
The inquiry is a setback for Healey, who has sought to tighten Treasury security since last year’s budget, when the budget watchdog’s forecasts were accessible before then-finance minister Rachel Reeves began speaking. A separate inquiry into a Financial Times report that Reeves had dropped plans to raise income tax failed to identify a source, as did an investigation into a Sun report on an expansion of the Bank of England’s bond-buying programme in November 2020.