Week ending 25 September 2026

August’s borrowing overshoot sets the Budget arithmetic, the flash PMI shows growth cooling just as costs pick back up, and Britain’s first CBD authorisations reach ministers’ desks, with our read on what each means for yours.

August borrowing hits £18.3 billion, the second-highest August on record

The last full set of borrowing figures before the 28 October Budget is now on the record, and it is the arithmetic behind this autumn’s tax speculation.

Public sector net borrowing was £18.3 billion in August, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported on Tuesday 22 September, £2.9 billion (19%) higher than August last year and the second-highest August on record, behind only 2020. Central government debt interest came to £8.8 billion, the highest August figure since monthly records began in 1997, £2.1 billion of it the capital uplift on index-linked gilts, the government bonds whose repayments rise with inflation. Public sector debt ended the month just below £3 trillion, at 93.8% of GDP, although as a share of the economy that is 1.3 percentage points lower than a year earlier.

The year so far reads better, with a catch. Borrowing in the financial year to August was £77.3 billion, £2.2 billion (2.7%) lower than the same period last year, helped by self-assessed income tax receipts of £18.6 billion across July and August, £1.9 billion more than a year before. It still sits £8.1 billion above where the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast said it would be by now, and August alone came in £3.5 billion above forecast. The ONS’s explanation for the August rise is plain: spending increased more than income from taxes and other receipts, partly reflecting inflation. The overshoot Baseline covered at the end of August has carried on through the summer, and the gap to the forecast is what feeds the speculation about what the Chancellor does on 28 October.

None of that speculation is a planning input. Reliefs, rates and thresholds are worth modelling once they are announced, and not before; a business that rebuilds its plan around each weekend’s rumoured measure will rebuild it several more times before Budget day. The useful preparation is knowing your own sensitivities, which lines in your plan a change to payroll costs, dividend treatment or investment reliefs would actually touch, so that when the real measures land there is a same-week answer rather than a scramble.

Questions worth revisiting

• Are next year’s numbers built on the tax rules as legislated, or on this autumn’s Budget speculation?

Worth a conversation if Budget what-ifs are starting to crowd out the planning you can actually control.

Sources: Office for National Statistics, Public sector finances, UK: August 2026, released 22 September 2026

Flash PMI slips to 51.7 as cost pressures return

Activity is cooling just as input costs rise at their fastest since June, and that pairing sets the terms for every fourth-quarter pricing conversation.

S&P Global’s flash UK Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), the survey of private-sector activity published as an early estimate on Wednesday 23 September from responses collected 10 to 21 September, put the composite output index at 51.7 for September, down from 52.5 in August and a three-month low. A reading above 50 still signals growth, just less of it. Services matched the composite at 51.7, while manufacturing output slipped to a six-month low of 51.4, although the headline manufacturing PMI, lifted by hiring and rising backlogs of work, rose to a three-month high of 52.0. New work across the private sector fell fractionally, export sales fell at the fastest pace since June, and employment edged down again, extending a decline now running at two years. Chris Williamson, S&P Global’s chief business economist, put the September pace at one “consistent with the economy growing at a mere 0.1% quarterly rate”.

The cost side is the part to sit with. Firms reported input prices rising at the fastest pace since June, citing fuel, energy, pay and raw materials, and prices charged accelerated in response, the survey’s overall measure of inflation also the highest since June. That extends the picture in the August services data Baseline covered on 4 September: the direction has held, and steepened.

For a founder the combination is uncomfortable and specific: demand softening at the same time as the cost base re-accelerates, with the Budget five weeks away. The practical question is whether your prices move on a mechanism you have set in advance, a scheduled review, an indexation clause, a trigger tied to named input costs, or only when margin makes the decision for you. One caveat worth holding: this is the flash estimate, and the final September readings follow on 1 and 5 October.

Questions worth revisiting

• Do your prices move on a mechanism you set in advance, or only when margin pain forces the issue?

Phoenix can help with the margin model that turns a cost rise into a pricing decision instead of a surprise.

Sources: S&P Global, Flash UK PMI: Output growth softens in September, while inflationary pressures intensify, released 23 September 2026

FSA board backs Britain’s first CBD authorisations, with ministers to decide

Regulated status for CBD is one ministerial decision away, and the way it is landing carries a wider lesson for any brand whose category rules are still moving.

At its board meeting in Swansea on Wednesday 16 September, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) board agreed that recommendations on three cannabidiol (CBD) novel-food applications, the approval route for foods new to the market, should go to ministers in England and Wales. The applications, identified by the FSA by their reference numbers RP 7, RP 350 and RP 427, and reported in trade coverage as coming from Pureis, Cannaray and a European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA) consortium, cover CBD of at least 98% purity, recommended with a provisional limit of 10mg a day and labelling warnings covering under-18s, pregnancy and breastfeeding, and those on medication or immunosuppressed. Around 3,000 individual products on the FSA’s public list are linked to these three applications, and the agency has published 14 further positive safety assessments since. In the FSA’s own words: “the resultant authorisations will be a regulatory first for Great Britain”, should ministers agree.

The complication comes from the FSA’s own paper. Under the pending UK-EU sanitary and phytosanitary agreement, the food-safety deal expected to take effect in 2027, GB authorisations “would cease to apply”, with oversight passing to the EU’s food-safety authority, whose provisional safe intake for CBD is roughly 2mg a day for a 70kg adult, a fifth of the FSA’s level. The FSA’s chair, Professor Susan Jebb, was direct after the meeting: “The long-term future for this sector really will lie with EU authorisations.” The status today is worth keeping exact: a board recommendation, not an authorisation; ministers decide, and no timeline has been given.

For founders in wellness the read is not about CBD itself; it is about what regulatory movement does to category expansion. First regulated status would reward the businesses that carried the cost of compliance early, and a rule set that could be superseded within a couple of years changes what any business should be willing to invest against it. The generalisable question is which of your plans depend on today’s rules holding. The FSA’s paper is short, readable and worth ten minutes of any wellness founder’s week.

Questions worth revisiting

• Which of your growth plans quietly assume today’s rule set still applies in two years?

If regulation sits inside your expansion maths, a Discovery Call is a sensible place to test what it does to the numbers.

Sources: Food Standards Agency, CBD novel food applications: recommendations to ministers on first authorisations, September 2026 board paper; Business of Cannabis, Chair of UK’s FSA says future of CBD regulation will ‘lie with’ EU authorisations, 22 September 2026

Decided by 46 seconds

The world 100k team title was decided by 46 seconds, and the size of that margin is the lesson.

The IAU 100k World Championships ran on Sunday 20 September in Ames, Spain: an opening loop, then five-kilometre laps on roads and bike paths. Charlie Lawrence of the United States won in 6:09:25, with Lithuania’s Aleksandr Sorokin second and Britain’s Alex Milne third in 6:17:50, his second world-championship medal in successive years; Courtney Olsen, also of the United States, took the women’s title in 7:10:31. The result to hold onto is the men’s team race, scored by adding together each country’s three fastest times: the United States totalled 19:17:18, Great Britain 19:18:04. Three scorers a side, a hundred kilometres each, and the world title came down to 46 seconds, about one second for every twenty-five minutes of running.

A lapped road 100k strips racing down to one variable, the pace a runner can hold. The business pair is the same: choose the growth rate your cash, capacity and margin can actually repeat, and defend the small edges, a point of gross margin held all year, a day trimmed from debtor terms, that compound the way 46 seconds did across those six races. Neither happens if the numbers cannot be seen, and building that visibility is exactly the kind of work Phoenix is built to do.

Sources: iRunFar, 2026 IAU 100k World Championships results, 20 September 2026; RunUltra, The RunUltra Update, 22 September 2026