Spring Statement 2025

“A serious plan for growth” On 26 March, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered her Spring Statement unveiling updated economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), announced further reductions to welfare spending and confirmation of a rise in defence spending. The Chancellor reiterated her commitment to “just one major fiscal event a […]

News in Review

“We have to be quite careful at this point in how we calibrate our response”  Last week, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) held Bank Rate at 4.5%, a widely expected move but one that was more emphatically supported than analysts had predicted.  At its meeting on 19 March, eight MPC members voted […]

Residential Property Review – March 2025

Housebuilding falls to seven-year low as planning delays persist   Housebuilding in England has dropped to its lowest level since 2017, excluding the pandemic period, with just 217,911 new homes completed in 2024.   This marks a 6% decline from 2023’s total of 231,000 and continues a four-quarter trend of falling completions, according to Energy Performance Certificate […]

Commercial Property Market Review – March 2025

Regional office investment rebounds as confidence grows  Investor sentiment in the regional office market has improved, with total investment reaching £2.9bn in 2024, up 10% from 2023, according to Savills.   The Big Six regional cities saw office take-up of 4.6 million sq. ft, 15% above the five-year average and the highest since 2019. Opportunistic investors […]

Advised investors are ‘less vulnerable’

Investors who receive financial advice are four times less likely to be vulnerable than the general population, according to analysis1.  The study looked at a cohort of more than 5,000 advised investors, assessing them using a psychometric financial wellbeing questionnaire. Designed by an in-house behavioural psychologist, the questionnaire was designed to find and evaluate indicators […]

News in Review

“The economy shrank a little in January but grew in the latest three months as a whole”  The UK economy shrank unexpectedly in January, according to official data released on Friday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). With a contraction of 0.1%, the economy fared worse at the start of 2025 than analysts had […]

The changing face of retirement – as the traditional ‘hard-stop’ is consigned to history

Catalysed by the 2011 abolition of the Default Retirement Age, a combination of economic and socio-demographic trends are changing people’s outlook to retirement; and this, in turn, is heightening the need to adopt a more fluid approach to retirement planning.  Carry on working   Research1 suggests the traditional ‘hard stop’ retirement is increasingly being consigned to […]