A quieter week for breaking news gives us room to look further ahead. Three developments that are not urgent today but belong in any founder’s planning for the next year or so, with our read on what they mean.
The Financial Policy Committee’s July report judges UK businesses broadly resilient, but names smaller and more leveraged firms as the group where higher energy costs and borrowing rates will bite, a point that lands closest to the founder-led end of the market.
The Bank of England published its July Financial Stability Report on 7 July. The Financial Policy Committee’s overall judgement is that UK households and businesses remain broadly resilient, with debt levels low by historical standards, and that the banking system is well capitalised and able to keep lending through a severe stress. Within that, the Committee expects higher energy costs and borrowing rates to increase debt-servicing pressures, particularly for low-income households and for smaller, more leveraged firms reliant on private credit or leveraged loans. It also noted that vulnerabilities in credit markets, including private credit, have persisted and in some cases intensified since December.
The useful reading for a founder is that the system-level reassurance and the firm-level warning are two separate findings. The Bank is not worried about lending capacity drying up. It is worried about servicing costs for businesses that carry meaningful leverage at today’s rates. Bank Rate has been held at 3.75% through the first half of the year, and was held again on 18 June with two of the nine committee members voting for a rise. The next decision arrives on 30 July. Nothing in this report suggests a business should plan on borrowing getting materially cheaper soon.
The practical move is to re-run your debt-servicing numbers on the assumption that current rates are the planning baseline, not a peak that is about to pass.
Phoenix can help you stress-test your funding structure against the rate environment the Bank is describing.
Source: Bank of England, Financial Stability Report, July 2026
HMRC’s new estimates show small businesses are now the largest part of the UK tax gap. The number is softer than it looks, and most of it comes down to honest error rather than evasion. Read plainly, it is a prompt to ask whether your own records would hold up to a closer look.
HMRC published its Measuring tax gaps 2026 edition on 23 June. The headline is that the tax gap, the difference between tax theoretically owed and tax actually collected, was an estimated 6.4% of liabilities in 2024-25, or £59.2 billion. The part that matters for a founder-led company is the composition: small businesses now account for 62% of the total, up from 40% in 2017-18, and around half of that small-business gap is Corporation Tax, where the estimated gap has risen to 18.1%.
Two things are worth holding alongside that. The first is that the figure is provisional and moves a great deal. HMRC revises these estimates as better data arrives, and in this same release it raised its own 2023-24 number from the 5.3% first published last year to 6.0%. The headline is a direction of travel, not a precise measurement. The second is the cause. HMRC attributes the largest share of the gap to failure to take reasonable care (35%) and error (16%), with evasion further down at 12%. For most smaller companies this points to books that do not quite hold up under scrutiny, and to ordinary mistakes rather than intent.
That is where the useful question sits, and it is an inward one. With so much of the gap arising from carelessness and error, the sensible response is simply to make sure your own records would stand up. The test is whether the numbers on your return trace back cleanly to source, and whether reasonable care would be easy to show if it were ever asked of you.
If you are not sure your books would stand up to a closer look, that is worth quietly putting right, whether or not anyone ever asks.
Source: HMRC, Tax gap 2024 to 2025 estimated at 6.4%, 23 June 2026
HMRC is consulting on making Direct Debit mandatory for VAT and PAYE. It is only a proposal, and the consultation runs to mid-August, so there is nothing to act on today. It is worth a look now because the timing of when tax leaves your account is a cash-flow question, and those are easier to think through with notice.
As part of its summer tax update, HMRC opened a consultation on 23 June proposing to require most VAT-registered businesses and employers to pay their VAT and PAYE liabilities by Direct Debit. At present only employers with at least 250 employees face a requirement to pay by electronic means. The consultation, which closes on 16 August, sets out HMRC’s view that late payment is often a matter of missed deadlines or misallocated payments rather than an inability to pay, and asks why businesses that could use Direct Debit currently choose other methods.
The reason this is worth a founder’s attention is timing. The amount of tax owed would be no different. What would change is the day it leaves your account, and the flexibility some businesses rely on in the gap between filing and paying would narrow. If payment is collected automatically on the due date, the funds need to be in place on that day, and for a business managing a tight month that is worth planning for.
Nothing here is settled, and the consultation may change the detail. There is nothing to act on today. The value in noting it now is to check whether a cash-flow plan that leans on payment timing would still hold if that timing were fixed for you.
If your cash-flow plan has never been tested against fixed payment dates, this is a good moment to run that check, while the change is still only a proposal.
After three years when the weather cut the full route short, Val d’Aran’s 163-kilometre race ran in full again. Both winners did more than finish it. They set the fastest times the course has seen.
The sixth Val d’Aran by UTMB ran from 1 to 5 July in the Spanish Pyrenees, drawing more than 7,000 runners from around 90 countries across its programme. Its flagship race, the 163-kilometre VDA with some 10,000 metres of climbing, set off on the afternoon of 3 July from Vielha. What made this year notable is that the full course ran at all. Storms forced the race to be cancelled in 2023 and 2024 and shortened in 2025, so this was the first time in four years the complete route could be attempted.
When the chance came, it went to the runners built for the whole of it. Argentina’s Santos Gabriel Rueda won the men’s race in 21 hours 32 minutes, at his third attempt, after finishing second the year before. Poland’s Katarzyna Dombrowska led the women’s race from early on and came home in 27 hours 33 minutes, seventeenth overall. Both were the fastest times recorded on the full 163-kilometre course.
There is something in that for a founder. You do not control when conditions allow the full test: the market window, the funding round, the clear run at growth. What you control is whether you have prepared for the whole distance, so that when the opening comes you can use it rather than spend it getting fit. Rueda had turned up twice before the year everything aligned. Preparation is what let him take the chance when it finally arrived.
Phoenix works with founders on building that readiness into the financial plan, so the business can move when its moment comes.
A free 30-minute Discovery Call is the place to start. No obligation, no sales pressure.