Britain Catches a Break - Someone Else Banks It

Britain catches a break, twice

Britain caught a couple of breaks on Tuesday, and both came with a catch. House prices nudged up 0.2% to an average £299,330 in June, the first monthly rise in four months, as lenders trimmed mortgage rates from their Iran-war highs and a Bank of England hike slid off the table — though the rebound is splitting the country, the North East up 2.8% while London slipped 1.1% to £534,831. The other lift came off the telly: Young's poured a 9% sales jump over 14 weeks as England's World Cup run packed its bars, full-year profit more than doubling to £41m. Pubs nationwide sank 6 million pints during the win over Mexico — 1.25m more than an average Sunday. A thaw and a good summer, then, but neither one a recovery.

The bigger money, and who keeps it

The bigger money stories were about who gets to keep the value. Novartis agreed to buy Imperial College spinout Myricx Bio for up to $1.5bn, a London lab that raised just £90m two years ago — a jackpot for its backers, and the latest case of Britain building something world-beating then watching the profit head to Basel. Big pharma is racing to plug a $450bn patent cliff, and cheap, research-rich UK labs are the obvious targets. Closer to home, the buy, borrow, don't sell playbook the wealthy use to avoid ever selling — borrowing against a portfolio to sidestep capital gains tax, now the tax-free allowance has been cut to £3,000 from £12,300 — is quietly reaching everyone else. Two stories, one question: the value's there; who captures it?

Britain finally caught a break — a housing thaw, a pub boom — even as its best young lab packed for Basel. To the rest of the issue. — M.B.

Write off the British housing market at your peril. After months of Iran-war gloom — spiking mortgage rates, spooked buyers, falling prices — UK house prices just nudged back up. Values rose 0.2% in June to an average £299,330, the first monthly rise in four months, as lenders trimmed mortgage rates and rate-hike fears faded. It’s not exactly a boom. But after a bruising spring, a green shoot is a green shoot. The catch? The recovery is quietly splitting Britain in two, and the North-South divide is only getting wider.

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Here’s a habit of the wealthy that rarely makes the headlines: they almost never sell their best investments. Instead, they borrow against them. With the capital gains tax allowance slashed to just £3,000, down from £12,300 a few years back, selling shares to raise cash can hand HMRC a painful bill. Borrow against investments and you skip the sale, defer the tax, and keep your money compounding. It’s the buy, borrow, don’t sell play, and it’s no longer reserved for billionaires. Here’s how it works, and where it can bite.

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There's something very British about growing a world-beating cancer lab in a London basement, then selling it to Switzerland before it's old enough to have a staff canteen. We're superb at the inventing. It's the owning we never quite get round to. — M.B.