Budget 2025: Consumer confidence falls as speculation ramps up – but London mayor welcomes major rail investment
Consumer confidence has tumbled amid rampant speculation about what the chancellor will announce in the budget, figures show.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) blamed “strong hints” from the government of income tax hikes for the public’s falling expectations of how much they’ll spend over the next three months – even as Christmas beckons.
While a planned increase in income tax rates was scrapped last week, Sir Keir Starmer has refused to rule out freezing income tax thresholds – which the Conservatives argue amounts to a tax rise by stealth because it drags people into paying higher rates even if their wages increase.
BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson said months of uncertainty had “heightened public concern about their own finances and the wider economy”.
Consumer expectations for the state of the economy over the next three months have fallen significantly to minus 44, down from minus 35 in October, according to data from the BRC and Opinium.
Ms Dickinson said action was needed from Rachel Reeves to “bring down the spiralling cost burden facing retailers”, which she said would “keep price rises in check”.
Read more: Inflation eases but food costs rise
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Is chancellor to blame for food price rises?
Signs of ‘fragile’ recovery in jobs market
In slightly more encouraging news for Ms Reeves ahead of her statement next Wednesday, new research suggests the jobs market may be on the up.
The Recruitment and Employment Confederation said the number of new job adverts last month was 754,359, up by 2.1% from September, taking the total to more than 1.6 million.
Ms Reeves’s decision to hike national insurance contributions for employers in last year’s budget was blamed for a slowdown in the market, and a rising unemployment rate.
The report said there has been an increase in adverts for medical radiographers, delivery drivers and couriers, and further education teaching professionals.
But it warned the apparent recovery was “fragile”.
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PM challenged on budget leaks
Reeves set to back DLR extension
One man looking forward to the budget is Sir Sadiq Khan, who has welcomed reports that London’s DLR is set to be given funding for an extension.
According to the Press Association, the chancellor will back an extension to the Docklands Light Railway to Thamesmead at a cost of £1.7bn – unlocking thousands of new homes.
Thamesmead has been notoriously short of public transport links ever since it was developed in the 1960s.
Thamesmead in southeast London straddles the boroughs of Bexley and Greenwich. Pic: PA
The plan would see the line extended from Gallions Reach, near London City Airport, and include a new station at Beckton as well as in Thamesmead itself.
Sir Sadiq said the DLR extension “will not only transform travel in a historically under-served part of the capital but also unlock thousands of new jobs and homes, boosting the economy not just locally but nationally”.
It is also expected to unlock land for 25,000 new homes and up to 10,000 new jobs, along with almost £18bn of private investment in the area.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force has scheduled a roundtable discussion centered on privacy and financial surveillance for December, as a renewed focus on privacy grips the cryptocurrency industry.
The privacy roundtable is slated for Dec. 15. Like other SEC roundtables, crypto industry executives and SEC officials will discuss common pain points and solutions, but no hard policy proposals will be submitted.
Privacy has become a hot-button topic following several developments, including the partial guilty verdict in Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s trial in June, the Samourai Wallet developer sentencing in November and the privacy token price rally over the last two months.
“Authoritarians thrive when people have no privacy. When those in charge start being hostile to privacy protections, it is a major red flag,” said Naomi Brockwell, founder of the Ludlow Institute, an organization advocating for liberty through technology.
The renewed interest in privacy hearkens back to crypto’s cypherpunk roots, and one of the core reasons the cryptographic technology that underpins crypto was invented — to ensure secure communication channels between parties in hostile environments.
Related: Crypto investors flee visibility for anonymity as privacy coins surge 80%
Crypto community sounds the alarm about privacy following precedent-setting legal cases
The verdict in the Storm trial and other cases where open-source software developers have been convicted or imprisoned for creating non-custodial, privacy-preserving protocols has set a dangerous precedent for privacy technology in the US, legal experts have said.
Crypto industry executives and advocates argue that the prosecutions are meant to dissuade developers from building privacy-preserving tools.
The verdict in the Samourai Wallet case is analogous to the US government accusing car manufacturer Toyota of a conspiracy because terrorists and criminals also use their cars, according to journalist and crypto advocate Lola Leetz.
“People should not be held accountable for what other people do with the tools they build,” Leetz said.
In August, Matthew Galeotti, the acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s criminal division, signaled the agency would no longer prosecute open-source software developers for writing code.
“Our view is that merely writing code, without ill intent, is not a crime,” Galeotti said. “The department will not use indictments as a law-making tool. The department should not leave innovators guessing as to what could lead to criminal prosecution.”
Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash, and more
Politics
All four UK governments ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of COVID pandemic threat – inquiry finds
All four UK governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat posed by COVID-19 or the urgency of the response the pandemic required, a damning report published on Thursday has claimed.
Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, described the response to the pandemic as “too little, too late”.
Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.
Noting how a “lack of urgency” made a mandatory lockdown “inevitable”, the report references modelling data to claim there could have been 23,000 fewer deaths during the first wave in England had it been introduced a week earlier.
The UK government first introduced advisory restrictions on 16 March 2020, including self-isolation, household quarantine and social distancing.
Had these measures been introduced sooner, the report states, the mandatory lockdown which followed from 23 March might not have been necessary at all.
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All four UK govts ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of pandemic
COVID-19 first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, and as it developed into a worldwide pandemic, the UK went in and out of unprecedented lockdown measures for two years starting from March 2020.
Lady Hallett admitted in her summary that politicians in the government and devolved administrations were forced to make decisions where “there was often no right answer or good outcome”.
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I can summarise my findings of the response as ‘too little, too late'”.
‘Toxic culture’ at the heart of UK government
The report said there was “a toxic and chaotic culture” at the heart of the UK government during the pandemic.
The inquiry heard evidence about the “destabilising behaviour of a number of individuals” – including former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings.
It said that by failing to tackle this chaotic culture – “and, at times, actively encouraging it” – former PM Boris Johnson “reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making”.
‘Misleading assurances’
The inquiry found all four governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland failed to understand the urgency of response the pandemic demanded in the early part of 2020.
The report reads: “This was compounded, in part, by misleading assurances from the Department of Health and Social Care and the widely held view that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.”
The report notes how the UK government took a “high risk” when it significantly eased restrictions in England in July 2020 – “despite scientific advisers’ concerns about the public health risks of doing so”.
Lady Hallett has made 19 key recommendations which, if followed, she believes will better protect the UK in any future pandemic and improve decision-making in a crisis.
Repeated failings ‘inexcusable’
In a statement following the publication of Thursday’s report, Lady Hallett said there was a “serious failure” by all four governments to appreciate the level of “risk and calamity” facing the UK.
She said: “The tempo of the response should have been increased. It was not. February 2020 was a lost month.”
Read more:
A timeline of the UK’s response to the pandemic
Lady Hallett said the inquiry does not advocate for national lockdowns, which she said should have been avoided if at all possible.
She said: “But to avoid them, governments must take timely and decisive action to control a spreading virus. The four governments of the UK did not.”
Lady Hallett said none of the governments were adequately prepared for the challenges and risks that a lockdown presented, and that many of the same failings were repeated later in 2020, which she said was “inexcusable”.
She added: “Each government had ample warning that the prevalence of the virus was increasing and would continue to do so into the winter months. Yet again, there was a failure to take timely and effective action.”
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