Taxing bank profits and gambling firms could raise billions. Here's how it could help fix Britain

How would you spend £14.5 billion?

Britain’s Treasury is running on fumes. With the autumn budget a couple of months around the corner, chancellor Rachel Reeves is searching for savings – and as ever, the spectre of increased taxation or cuts looms large.

But the money is out there, experts say – if you know where to look.

A windfall tax on the profits of Britain’s four biggest banks could raise £11.3bn, think tank Positive Money claims.

They can afford it – Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds and HSBC are on track to make a record £48bn profit after tax in 2025, based on their bumper results for the first half of this year. These earnings are not normal: they far outpace the £25.6bn those same banks made on average between 2018 and 2021, before the Bank of England started raising interest rates. High interest rates allow banks to charge more on loans.

Meanwhile, former prime minister Gordon Brown has urged chancellor Rachel Reeves to hike gambling taxes – a policy that would generate extra £3.2bn a year.

Together, that’s £14.5 billion to play with. Here’s what you could do with it:

Make up the planned disability benefits cuts savings nearly three times over

Plans to slash disability benefits earlier this year met with widespread outrage.

The cuts would have saved £5bn a year – at the cost of pushing hundreds of thousands into poverty.

An 11th-hour U-turn gutted the bill, sacrificing the proposed savings. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the welfare bill is no longer expected to deliver any savings over the next four years, as £1.7bn of cuts to universal credit are offset by the increase to the standard allowance.

The government expended much political capital attempting to get the cuts over the line. With an extra £14.5bn in the coffers, they wouldn’t have needed to.

A four-year end to the two-child benefit cap

More than 1.6 million children were affected by the two-child limit in the year to April 2025. Child poverty advocates describe it as the single biggest driver of family poverty in the UK.

Scrapping it would cost about £2.5bn a year now, rising to £3.6bn as more families qualify.

Our hypothetical cash pile could lift the cap for four years straight – and pull hundreds of thousands of children out of hardship.

Make a start on taking water back into public hands

According to research from the University of Greenwich, nationalising England’s water companies outright would cost an estimated £49.7bn in shareholder compensation.

We wouldn’t get the whole way there with £14.5bn – but we’d make a sizable dent.

Ultimately, the rest would pay for itself: “Even after taking account of the cost of compensation. Nationalisation would pay for itself in less than seven years,” Greenwich academics found.

Hire 43,800 National Crime Agency officers to help ‘tackle people smugglers‘

Earlier this week, the Home Office announced it would spend £100 million from its existing budget to recruit 300 new National Crime Agency officers – roughly £333,000 per post, once you factor in salaries, kit, tech and other overheads.

Apply the same maths to our hypothetical £14.5bn windfall, and you could recruit 43,800 officers instead. That’s enough to station an NCA operative on pretty much every UK beach, every ferry terminal and possibly every rowing boat on the Thames – all in the name of “smashing the gangs”.

Whether it would actually work is another question – human rights organisations have slammed the government’s punitive approach to asylum seekers as ‘inhumane’.

Pay 306,250 years of rent in Rushanara Ali’s East London townhouse

Now-former homelessness minister Rushanara Ali came under fire after evicting tenants from her East London townhouse, later relisting it at a higher rent – up from £3,300 to £4,000 a month.

At that rate, £14.5bn could cover more than 306,000 years in the property… provided the rent doesn’t go up again.

Package holidays for 12.6 million Brits

If you’ve been online over the past few months, chances are you’ve encountered the immortal words: ‘Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday.’

Superimposed over footage of holidays gone disastrously wrong, the audio has become a viral meme.

But for those willing to brave the risks of a jaunt abroad, the government’s new hypothetical windfall could send 12.6 million Brits on a lovely week-long holiday.

Consumer advocacy organisation Which? analysed the prices of more than 8,000 European package holidays and estimates the average per person package price will be £1,157 this summer.

Bon voyage!

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