Is a ground rent cap a good idea for leaseholders and why is it controversial?

0:02Welcome to This Is Money podcast sponsored by Charles Stanley Direct. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Lee Boyce today is Helen Crane. And coming up, the government's announced a cap on ground rent, a welcome policy that finally fixes a broken system, or does it risk creating new problems along the way? Watch out, HMRC is about. Stamp duty investigations are on the rise. Is it all Angela Rayner's fault? Also today, despite a bit of a tumble this week, gold and silver have been on a tear-up of late. Is it a sign of bad things to come? NS9 has made some cheeky cuts to its bonds, but cash-wise this season is upon us and the rape battle is on.

0:40Plus wood burners. They're going cheap at the moment, but can you use them without destroying the planet? Don't forget to stay up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, a message from our sponsors. We know you love staying informed about money, therefore we think you'll love this. Charles Stanley Direct's financial coaching service gives you one-to-one time with a qualified expert, helping you make sense of your finances and feel confident about your next steps. Book a free 15-minute call today at charles-stanley.co.uk forward slash financial coaching.

1:14That's charles-stanley.co.uk forward slash financial coaching. Remember, investment involves risk. Now back to the show. Labour's announced plans to cap ground rents for leaseholders in England and Wales at£250 a year from 2028, with a promise to phase them down to almost zero eventually. It's welcome news for the over 80 % of leaseholders who have to pay the charge. But many say ground rent is only a small part of the problem, with service charges, cladding costs and lack of control, leaving flats hard to sell and sometimes effectively worthless. But a move to fix a broken system could have unintended consequences for pension funds.

1:54Helen, a lot in this story. Let's just go back to basics. Ground rents. What are they? Who has to pay them? They're different to service charges, aren't they?

2:06Helen Crane: They are. I think the first thing to say is, on the face of it, this sort of sounds like it might be quite a small story, but it actually isn't. As you said, there's so many different elements to this and it really sort of brought the whole leasehold problem into focus again this week I think and all the difficulties of fixing that and you know that there are about five million leaseholders in the UK as well so it's not a small amount of people that this affects it's essentially anyone who owns a flat and some people who own houses as well so ground rents are a charge that people pay normally annually that leaseholders pay to their freeholder which is to put it simplistically the company or person that owns the land that their flats we'll say flat because most of them are flats the land that their flat is built on and they own the building as well so if you've got a block of flats you own your own flat your own individual unit but what the freeholder owns is first the land and also the wider building so like the canoe layers like your hallways and your gardens the freeholder is the person that owns those and you kind of need a freeholder because someone does need to own that wider building um but ground rents really controversial so they're essentially paid for the right to live to the right to have your flat on that freeholder's land so people kind of call it feudal and a bit medieval it's essentially a you know paying your way so that you can live in your flat that you own on this landowner's property and how much are you talking here so it really varies so the cap that's been brought in this was announced by kia starmer this week is 250 pounds a year and for some leaseholders that will be around what they pay so the average and this is from 2023 the last time this or government data was taken so people might be paying a bit more now the average across the UK is£304 in London I think it's just over£400 however some people pay much much more because there's these really sort of egregious clauses in some leasehold contracts that say that the longer that you stay in your flat the ground rent kind of continues to go up so some of them have a clause that says the ground rent doubles every 10 years and that's when it can get really really tricky people kind of get trapped with these big charges so um one of my colleagues spoke to someone this week who said that their ground rent was now over a thousand pounds a year because it had started at something like 250 then it doubled after 10 years and after another 10 years it went up to a thousand and when you get into those sort of levels it starts to make flats maybe difficult to sell because someone else doesn't want to take on a flat that has you know this a thousand pound charge every year and then also on top uh flat owners if you live in a big block normally pay quite chunky service charges so it's a part of a much bigger uh or headache i guess that leasehold property owners have um so i think people will welcome this uh we we should say that this 250 cap that labor has proposed this is just in uh some draft legislation uh that's been put forward So it's not law yet.

5:24Helen Crane: People are still paying these charges now. And the earliest it will come into force looks like 2028. So, you know, that's if it does happen. Some people have pointed out that that's obviously quite close to the next election. So whether it will happen sort of remains to be seen. But it is good news. But, you know, as we said, Lee's hold is part of a much sort of bigger problem. Lee you were nodding along during that I was just ever so slightly distracted because Helen spoke about the prime minister announcing it and it was on TikTok which unsurprisingly I

6:03Georgie Frost: missed yeah me too not the target audience obviously Georgie for this announcement but you know that's the way the world's going you know new media things getting announced you know on the cool kids channels getting down with the kids then telling them about their ground rent before i wade into this i i used to work for a company before i was a journalist when i was at university doing a summer job and uh my job was to basically do credit control and phone up people who'd missed their ground rent uh on certain properties and i can't name names but one time i had to phone a very big name celebrity uh that also came up on if you've ever works in the call center you know well i mean it just all also appeared i was like i had no time to prepare to phone this celebrity and say your ground rent was due and the invoice had been missed um and the person actually answered the phone um i i i think that i i think leasehold ground rents uh service charges are an incredible racket uh on the whole i think that they are littered with unfair clauses in which they might go up with inflation they might be doubled they might triple there's a lot of unfair uh clauses in these things um and and hedon was talking there about flats and this does affect a huge amount of flats but there's also been there was an uptick uh i would say in the kind of mid mid 2010s uh of lots of new build estates with uh houses on that have also fallen into this kind of leasehold, ground rent trap, service charge trap.

7:42Georgie Frost: And you would have been told about it. It's not like a mis-selling scandal. We know the process is incredibly slow because there's so many searches and so much information that we have to digest. So it's not like people have gone into these things blindly. but what quite often happens especially in in terms of a flat quite quite often it's a first time buyer property and you're a bit of a novice at buying a property and might see things like ground rents and leasehold and just really not wrap your head around it and kind of know what that means and it's a very i would say it's a uniquely british thing really i don't think this is a kind of a global system that's used in many other countries uh leasehold ground rents it does feel pretty pretty medieval so anything that i feel that anything that's happening to get this under control is a good thing it's just as helen pointed out there 2028 feels quite a way away there's going to be legal challenges from you know people with vested interest in this who make money uh from from these fees and it's scratching the surface really georgie uh in terms of the the real problems with leasehold and and service charges i mean we've had some examples of service charges that it would make your eyes water the amount of money that people are being charged and trying to get a breakdown of where a service charge goes and who's being you know used which companies are being used to do certain things for service charges is is incredibly difficult um and people feel like they they're blindly giving this hand in this money over um and getting very little in return and it's just getting more and more expensive so it's it's a quite a big problem it's a big thing to tackle and whether they can actually make this happen or not is is another thing and you know it's 250 pounds a cap when people are paying an average of 300 and something that great i mean yeah yeah i don't know i mean i mean it stops the spiraling like you said leah it stops the spiraling yeah it does it does it does have that effect but it doesn't stop other aspects of uh of the costs involved spiraling though and that's what yeah i guess that's what the worry would be well you know we'll just dump this into the service charge part instead um you know they'll have that's maybe why they're talking about this coming in in two years time because there's a lot of kinks to iron out and there's a lot of i don't think this is a one size fits all kind of problem and i think it also it's more expensive in london in the southeast compared to up north what i'm trying to say here is if you're paying 100 quid up north somewhere and it's 400 pounds in london and it's the same property owner because a lot of pockets of land have been bought up by certain companies and whatnot they'll just pull levers to try and smooth this all out and make sure their bottom line isn't being hit so it's it's on the face of it and it seems like a small story it seems like a very sort of straightforward is a cap coming in but there's a lot of complexities i would say in this that are going to need to be addressed um and it's going to take time well there's two issues there's one that was a bit surprising um helen which i mentioned very briefly about pension funds and the unintended consequences there but just the The other part of it was the fact that we've spoken about this on the show in recent months, about the problem with selling flats.

11:10And this to me doesn't seem like it's, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, going to really make a difference. I mean, this is something that you've written about, something that you're invested in. So what was your conclusion?

11:24Helen Crane: I think this ground rent news is it's part of a much bigger range of things that are happening to leasehold to hopefully make this better. It's really sort of fragmented. So there's loads of different little bits of legislation. There are different sort of parts in the legal process. there was actually a leasehold reform act that was passed i think last year or was at the end of 2024 but it hasn't been implemented yet because the freeholders who own these properties keep bringing legal challenges so it's really really fraught with difficulty i think we are on the way to making things better and i think that's right but it's a sort of situation where there's so many vested interest that it takes a really long time i mean the government's sort of grand overarching plan eventually is for all new flats to be common hold instead of leasehold.

12:17Helen Crane: Common hold is something that is common in other countries but we haven't it's not really used in the UK and it's basically a system where if you had a bunch of flat owners in a block they'd essentially all own the building jointly. It is similar to share a freehold, which some flats are owned under now, but it gives them a lot more sort of control over what happens. And it does mean that they have more kind of management responsibilities though. So it can be a bit of a sort of double edged sword. And I think things are changing, but I can totally understand why leaseholders are frustrated at the pace of that, especially when, you know, as Lee said, these are people's starter homes.

13:00Helen Crane: Some people do, but people don't often buy, you know, a one bed flat and a city centre and think right this is my home for life these are people who sort of getting on the property ladder and then you know we spoke to someone this week who um had bought his flat in 2016 he's now married really wants to move out but they're still living in this one bed flat because it has unsafe cladding which is another issue that leaseholders face so they can't sell it can't move out and people just kind of get stuck in their in their starter homes and can't can't move on because all their money is tied up in it as well it's not like you know they can rent it out and move because that lump of cash that they would need to to move somewhere is all tied up in that house so it's it's extremely difficult there's loads of different issues with flats and especially new build flats but hopefully at some point it will start to get better but I as I said I don't understand why people are frustrated.

13:57It was when I was looking for a place to buy that was my absolute no way would i get something like that anyway i want to talk about something that investment manager m &g said so basically the government plans to cap ground rents are disproportionate and risk ruining the uk's reputation and then we've got the pension

14:17Georgie Frost: funds bit what is this about m &g are one of the vested interests that helen and i have kind of brought up here so it's directly exposed to 722 million pounds of ground rent assets and it says if the changes are approved it would lead to a one-off 230 million pound reduction in the group solvency to own funds and reduce its solvency by the percentage point so put that into plain english please lee um chat chat gp lee it's essentially saying that obviously some of the ground rents that he charges are over this 250 pounds uh benchmark so he's going to reduce the amount that they're making and people may not realize this but they might have mng in their part of their pension plan they might not you might not even know you know it's that kind of like breaking it down again and have a look what you're actually directly exposed to um and it's it said it supports plans to strengthen leaseholder protection and tackle the ground rents but the proposed solution is disproportionate and we will continue to consider our response which goes back to the point that hellum is making this is just one company uh that's saying this there's going to be a variety of companies that are going to be you know frantically preparing their statements getting lawyers uh working out how to circumnavigate this um and it says you have to write down the value of some of its assets and expects a 15 million pound hit to annual profits And I look at that and I think 15 million pound hits of annual profits.

15:51Georgie Frost: It's hard to explain, but it's like these companies obviously making quite a lot of money out of this activity. And indirectly, you might be exposed to it in your pension fund. I mean, you might be someone that's paying ground rent to a company and you're also invested in that same company in your pensions. so it's almost like you're paying your own pension with your ground rent um but there'll be a lot of this georgie i would suspect uh in the coming weeks and months as as these companies kind of explain their you know direct kind of hit what the hit they will take from this um and i would expect a battle um you know because no company wants to be shaving off anything off their annual profits but i think i honestly in my own in my own personal opinion i'm not affected by this at all But I've always thought that ground rents and service charges are incredibly unfair, especially when they start spiralling out of control.

16:52Georgie Frost: And it's good that it's on the forefront of, you know, hopefully being shaken up and made fairer. All right, then let's move this to one side. Correlation does not imply causation and all that. However, since Angela Rayner was caught not paying the correct amount of tax on her seaside apartment in Hove, HLC has carried out more stamp duty investigations. She had to resign as Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, if you remember back in September after it was found she broke the ministerial code. Now, according to new research, stamp duty land tax investigations rose 88 % in the 2024-25 tax year up from the previous year.

17:32So just remind us briefly what happened and why this might be linked.

17:39Helen Crane: Yeah, so the Angela Rayner issue, it seems like a really long time ago now, doesn't it? Back in September 2021. So many things have happened since then. But essentially, it was this issue around stamp duty and pretending that a home that isn't your main home actually is your main home for stamp duty purposes. so if you buy a property and you're not going to live in it as your main house so either you're going to rent it out or it's maybe a holiday home as I think it was in Angela Rayner's case you have to pay more stamp duty so now there is a used to be a three percent stamp duty surcharge for second homes it's now recently gone up to five percent so it's a chunky extra amount of tax you have to pay.

18:31Helen Crane: But obviously, people try and get around this in all kinds of different ways, claiming that the place that they actually live is not the place that they actually live. And there's some rules around how something is defined as being your main home or not. And I think this is where Angela Rayner kind of got into a bit of a sticky situation. So HMRC will look at it on a kind of case by case basis. And they'll look at all kinds of different things like, where do you spend time um if you have kids where do your kids go to school um where do you work in relation to where the property is all to kind of make an educated guess on whether that actually counts as your main home or not um and i think people are kind of trying to bluff this now i mean i don't know if anyone's been sort of inspired by angela rayner to try and do it obviously she got caught out but she's a very high profile person so kind of all eyes were on her but it seems like there's people all over the country who are kind of trying to play this game as well and say, oh no, this is a main home.

19:35Helen Crane: I'm not going to rent this out. This isn't just my holiday home. This is where I live. I don't owe this extra stamp duty surcharge. So yeah, it's something HMRC are looking into more and more and yeah, trying to crack down on that thing by the sounds of it. Lee, where are they getting their information from? You know, what sort of things might you be caught out on? Yeah, they look at all kinds of different things. So if we sort of cast our minds back, in Angela Rayner's case, her other property was owned in a been put into a trust and was owned, if I remember rightly, by someone else in her family sort of through that trust.

20:17Helen Crane: And I think that was part of the reason why she thought that either she was in the right or that she could get away with it depending on your kind of view on that, I suppose. So that actually doesn't kind of hold much weight though. So in our article, we spoke to a tax expert and he said, whether a property has been transferred into a trust or to a partner doesn't necessarily carry much weight with HMRC. So they essentially HMRC are kind of going snooping a bit on this really. So first of they might kind of talk to your solicitor or your conveyancer who acted on your behalf when you bought the property and they yeah they'll check your tax return for accuracy they'll write or phone you to tell you if they want to check your stamp duty return so they're they're essentially looking at all kinds of sources the land registry as well and yeah professional advisor accountants lawyers financial advisors could all shop you to hmrc technically they're they're obliged in a sense to do that under uh sort of financial regulations if they think that something's not as it should be and it also has and i didn't know about this before we did this piece this week a sophisticated ai system called hmrc connect which essentially gives access to vast amounts of personal and financial data on people it's actually i know it's actually used this since 2010 to identify potential cases of tax evasion and avoidance.

21:51Helen Crane: So yeah, HMRC has an AI sort of supercomputer, which cross-references all kinds of tax records with other databases. So like the land registry, maybe bank accounts, overseas bank accounts, and also, of course, gets anonymous tip offs from people. So if you've annoyed one of your neighbours or something, and they suspect that you're not living in your house uh for time then do do be aware that they could shop you to hmrc goodness me all of those ai and computers and all that and they still can't answer the blooming phone

22:24Georgie Frost: i was gonna say hey hmrc and sophisticated ai software people for stamp duty mates if you just go is this real or is this a kind of like you know line they put out there to try and scare people a bit like when people don't pay for a tv license and they threaten to kind of like find out if you've if you're using the TV or not. It feels a little bit like that. But I guess, you know, their strategy is working, Georgie, whatever they're doing, because, you know, as you pointed out right at the beginning there, you know, the investigation is up 88%, 3 ,035 in the most recent tax year, up from 1 ,617 the previous year.

23:01Georgie Frost: And the additional tax recovered is up 135%, so to£200 million, up from£85 million. So obviously a lot of people are trying to dodge the system and think they're going to get away with it. And they're not, is the long and short of it. And, you know, most of us, the large majority of us always want to make sure that we're doing the right things and not falling foul of HMRC or, you know, doing things that are a little bit dodged. And I'm sure some of this is, you know, honest mistakes because, again, things are complicated when it comes to tax affairs and people are making mistakes. Look at Angela Rayner.

23:37Georgie Frost: I mean, I don't think she would have purposely wanted to have dodged that and that whole kind of, you know, massive news story that came out about it. So if she's getting caught out, you can imagine quite a lot of other people are getting caught out because they're getting confused by the rules. But again, it's really where a solicitor should be doing the legwork and telling you how much your stamp GC bill is. because having just filled out one of these forms, it does very clearly ask you at the mountain of forms, but it definitely asks you if you own any properties, whether this is going to be your main residence.

24:10Georgie Frost: There's a lot of boxes to tick that I feel would catch this. So it must just be people thinking they're going to get away with it is how it seems to me. That's it. Part one.

24:27Helen Crane: I'm joined now by Rog Morgan from Charles Stanley Direct for our weekly investing explained feature. Rob, we've got a question from a reader this week. I have multiple accounts across several platforms and I'd like to consolidate to one platform provider. What benefits does this bring and what considerations should I have? So it's a good question. Consolidation can make sense. For example, to keep everything under one roof with one provider can really help with monitoring your investments and keeping to an investment strategy across multiple holdings. But before initiating any transfer, make sure you're aware of any drawbacks that are involved.

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25:51For instance, many platforms charge on a per-account basis, So ISA, SIP and investment accounts are each charged separately. But with Charles Stanley Direct, there is a fee cap applied across all a person's accounts combined, which can potentially save money. And with Charles Stanley Direct, there's no separation between fund charges and share charges. All investments do come under the same percentage-based charging structure that never exceeds the£600 annual maximum charge. There's also£100 worth of trades each year included in that deal. Transferring can also unlock different features for your accounts.

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27:13For example with Charles Stanley Direct there is currently an offer of up to£1 ,500 for transferring eligible accounts across. But as always, with any offers like this, terms apply, so do always check those carefully.

27:27Helen Crane: Rob, thank you very much. Thank you, Helen. Welcome back. Gold has been on spunkling form of late, despite a little tumble this week. The precious metal is still up around 17 % so far this year at the time of recording, obviously. Silver hit new highs and even copper started to pick up. The move is being driven by mounting geopolitical tensions with precious metals seen as a haven in tumultuous markets and tumultuous times. So where will it all head and what does it all mean? Lee, what's been going on with gold? I just want to sing spando ballet, but I can't sing, so I won't. And the little tumble that it experienced.

28:07But just let's talk about the tear up that it's been on.

28:10Georgie Frost: I once sung gold karaoke night at a student bar at university and I destroyed the microphone. It was quite expensive because I was screaming gold so loud down the microphone. Nice little story for you there. This podcast is always delivering, isn't it? It's always giving me something. A little insight into life. Yeah, ruined the microphone. Maybe at the end you could give it a go. Yeah, I don't want to ruin this microphone. So I better not. Gold and silver, metal madness, Georgie, I think is how it's been coined this week. Coined. Coined. Here we go. So you look at the price chart of both gold and silver, it's absolutely incredible.

28:51Georgie Frost: Price of gold is up 83 % in the past year from 2 ,300 announced to past$5 ,000 this week. It went up as high as 5 ,600. But as you say, at time of recording this podcast, who knows what's going to happen next? It's back down to 5 ,100. Silver's on an even bigger tear-up. you know from a much lower price point uh we've seen year-on-year change 224 percent if you bought silver a year ago uh 18 months ago you'd be seeing quite pretty now um the cost of the price of silver is this absolutely astronomical so there's a number of things that are going on geopolitical factors are definitely you know the main one uh to mention here because people see it as a safe haven you know they turned to it as a safe safe haven uh in times of you know kind of worrying situations across the world only this week you know the tensions between the us and iran is an example of that got the whole greenland situation still rumbling on in the background we have the trade tariffs um a lot of it driven obviously by the us a lot of things that i mentioned here driven by the us um there's pressure on the dollar uh at the moment and part of this is also driven by a kind of global worry about potentially the US president stripping away the independence of the Federal Reserve.

30:18Georgie Frost: That's part of the picture. Concerns over debt, inflation, monetary policy again. A lot going on isn't there Lee? Largely in the US. Silver specifically is a kind of slightly different beast because a lot of the demand there's demand from sort of ai infrastructure data centers solar green energy technology things like that where silver is actually used um and people have kind of really speculated and got in there and it's just driving prices up absolutely phenomenally it's it really has been metal madness it's it's just been insane um but you mix all of those things together investors are always looking for a diverse portfolio and to get involved in things that you know potentially might hedge risks elsewhere and it feels like a lot of people have turned to precious metals as a way of kind of doing this and safety is that what you're saying but it's a safe haven safety it is it's a safe haven product there's also that part that the other part of the puzzle this a little bit as well is i think that there's this kind of drive towards having a physical asset you know you might buy a gold coin or a silver coin or a bar gold bar a silver bar and actually hold that asset in your hand and see it in a world in which a lot of you know things we do are on a screen uh you don't actually physically kind of see these things but i'm just looking at this gold chart here georgia i mean it's absolutely phenomenal it was flat for so long you look at a 10-year chart flat as a pancake and then you get to sort of 2024 and it just starts to completely take off now where it goes next of course is what a big question will be for investors that you know does it come to an end a lot of analysts though are still bullish on where precious metal prices are going to go this year some suggesting it could reach 6 000 the gold this is could reach six thousand dollars an ounce at deutsche bank said heightened tensions and higher defense spending create a long-term case for gold uh rbc says a bullion could push as high as seven thousand one hundred dollars this year if last year's rally continues at a similar pace but neil wilson at saxo uk he's an investor strategist he warns that the recent precious metals run as all the hallmarks of a speculative squeeze this is increasingly disorderly volatile and dangerous and he goes on to our we know the backdrop and solid fundamentals to this trade but the moves are highly unusual the volatility can be self-sustaining as market makers become reluctant to take and hold positions leading to thinner liquidity and greater volatility so all right it's very very difficult obviously to predict what goes on next but a lot of the analysts are very bullish still um is the kind of general vibe um so if you think you're buying in tread with caution exactly yeah and yeah think about what percentage of your investment portfolio this is making up or you don't even have to think about it in an investment point of view more your overall wealth in terms of you know where where your money is in pensions savings investments how much volatility you really want to have it's almost like a FOMO of cryptocurrency though because it's so accessible to be able to get your hands on one thing is for sure though if you have got some gold or silver rattling around in jewelry boxes and wherever else you might have your jewelry rattling around and you don't wear it you're going to get a good price for it now can I ask Lee a really

34:04Helen Crane: stupid question I think this is going to make this is going to out me as being an incredibly stupid person but so you know they're saying copper is going up now which seems insane copper is now metal that people want to buy i have tons and tons and tons of like one peas and two peas i have like you know those giant bottles that they use in pubs like spirit bottles in pubs like the upside down ones i have one of those absolutely full of like two peas a are they actually made of copper and b is that now worth more than the value of the one and two peas is that the same question i i know the answer to this well i know that there's aren't they copper plated steel so they're mostly steel aren't they oh but i mean unless you scrape off the copper of them it all

34:49Georgie Frost: depends helen because in 1992 they changed the makeup of a2p coin so before september 1992 is approximately 97 % copper. But Georgie is right. Post-1992, coins minted are, TP coins minted are copper plated still. So it's roughly 7 % copper. So sorry to interrupt me. But it's a good question. Do you know what? We're going to answer that next week on the website because I reckon people will read that.

35:22Helen Crane: Okay. Are you guys got any pre-1992 models in there? Yeah. And it is a good question related to copper and copper's movement because it does have a bit of a nickname among investors as Dr. Copper for its reputation that it can predict economic trends. So there you go. I don't know where you would take those coins to to get loads of money from. But anyway, right. Savings, Lee, I can just feel the red from your face coming as you get excited about cash ice season. But before we do that, rein it in because we need to talk about NS &I. Cheekily cutting, you said, Helen, rates on two of its easy access accounts, just as your savings expert, Sylvia Morris, predicted.

36:08So let's go there first before we start talking about cash ice's inching rates up. Helen, what's been going on with NSNI?

36:17Helen Crane: So it has unfortunately cut the rates on two of its popular easy access accounts this week. So these accounts are income bonds, which are popular with some 222 ,000 pensioners because they pay out interest monthly rather than annually. So the rate on those used to be 3.26 % and is now going to fall to 3.01%. The direct saver, which is the annual sort of equivalent of that account, is going down from 3.3 % to 3.05%. And that's going to hit 430 ,000 savers. So that's quite a significant chunk of people. and yeah it is is quite a large cut you know way below the base rate which is now at 3.75 percent so I think yeah that takes these NSI and I accounts you know significantly below some of the other comparable ones on the market yeah so I think a bit of a sort of disappointing one for savers.

37:24Helen Crane: And this comes as well if you look at comparable accounts. So for example, cash ISAs, we're seeing a little bit of a sort of rate rally as the ISA season comes around. So yeah, making NS &I, I guess, less competitive compared to other accounts that people might be looking at. A bit disappointing, Lee Boyce, but bucking the trend of Bank of England cut, we are seeing some cash isa providers inching their rates up so the question is where should you be parking your money how do you find the best account and what has been going on in the

38:01Georgie Frost: cash isa market lee just quickly on the ns1 one as well i think that they've sacrificed a couple of those accounts to keep propping up the premium bond prize rate because premium bonds really are people are still pouring in a lot of money into premium bonds and they've kept the underlying rate of 3.6 percent which i think is a bit of a surprise uh that it's still holding up uh and it probably is next for the chopping block but it just feels like this has like been a bit of a sacrifice uh to keep that but yeah we we are slowly moving into isa season georgia aren't we and of course we've had all of the excitement over uh the reduction in the cash isa limit from april 2027 uh for under 65s um but yes there has been a small little skirmish uh i would say from some of the the kind of um smaller providers well i say smaller providers kind of lesser known names i would argue compared to sort of big banks and whether it's a home for your cash that you're up for sort of going for uh it will just depend so etoro uh it's got a 4.49 percent rate comes with a 0.8 percent boost for 12 months minimum deposit of 500 pounds and if you transfer it in you have to have a minimum of 15 000 uh trading 212 4.38 with a 0.78 percent boost for the year minimum deposit of a pound and you can transfer in but the boosted rate only applies to current tax year subscriptions complicated stuff this george it's not as simple as here's your iso rate uh money box 4.39 percent a 0.94 percent boost for 12 months 500 pound minimum deposit except transfers in and finally in this little cohort of rates have been going up is plum at 4.36 really chunky bonus though 1.80 for 12 months so that's going to fall um very very harshly uh one pound minimum deposit and crucially it accepts transfers in but the funds won't receive the boosted rate so probably not going to be a home for your transferred cash isa now as i said i've just listed out some names there uh that you might not be familiar with and if you have a look through our cash isa tables um there's atom again you might not have heard of these these are all fscs protector by the way which is um the financial services you wouldn't mention on your website would you ones that are not right but you do have to be a little bit careful how these guys split the money uh depending on who you're choosing because they might split it between banks that you already are a customer of and if you are fortunate enough to have you know big bundles of cash you know you want to make sure that you're not going over uh these these limits so that is an important point but you have a look at these in fact all of our savings tables they're just dominated by smaller names so i'm looking down the list here so we've got trading 212 plum money box atom vida savings synergy bank charter savings bank vanquist bank vida savings again family building society kent reliance all the more tandem bank leeds building society uh first real i mean leeds building society obviously a fairly big brand and skipton as well um you've got virgin money in there 3.9 and then it just all starts to really collapse from under that point um so yes there's a little cash isa battle but it's all from kind of platforms that you should go and research make sure you're going to be happy with it make sure the customer service has got good reviews um but as i said we wouldn't mention these rates if we hadn't done the due diligence on them what do you think will happen though going forward with cash isa rates just just for the next tax year because obviously the changes and all that coming in what do you think will be likely i think that it could go down two routes um i remember when we were talking about this last year when we were kind of there were rumors about it being cut and i said this might be the last chance to cash stuff your isa and it could shift behavior where people might ordinarily split between a stocks and shares iso and a cash iso they might just all put it into cash because it might be the last chance to be able to do that um i think that's probably again what might happen this time around so it's either going to be that there's going to be a battle for from providers to get really good cash iso rates out there because they know the appetite will be there but you could look at it from the other point of view and go well people are going to be looking for homes for their cash and providers are going to max out uh pretty rapidly uh in the cash cash iso front um you know targets so it's going to be interesting um hopefully there'll be a bit of a cash iso war um and if there is it will be led by all of these types of provider it won't be the big banks or the big building societies i would i very much doubt anyway thank you lee and finally woodburners have a bit of a PR problem.

43:07Very beautiful. They feel great. A bit getting your throat a little bit, maybe. But can you use them, Helen, without upsetting Ed Miliband, basically, is the question. You have a reporter that's gone out, investigated. They reckon, yeah, you probably can. What's this about?

43:23Helen Crane: Yeah, this is a great piece, actually. So it's by our reporter, Toby Waln, who has a wood burner. And I think people are just maybe tending to avoid them now because as you said they have a bit of a PR problem there's loads of different rules about how you can use them and what you can burn and I think people just think oh do you know what I can't be bothered I just turn the heating on rather than get a wood burner and have to work out what I'm allowed to do with it and you know have to find specific things to burn and have to be in control of how much smoke it emits and you know potentially have people who come around judging me for like burning the planet I just won't bother but this is the reason why this is such an interesting piece is because Toby has explained how he uses his and the fact that actually it doesn't have to be as bad for the environment as people think you know it's not great it's not like planting a tree but it actually can be much more eco-friendly than people maybe think um and actually wood burners are going quite cheap now and so in this article uh toby spoke to someone who in fairness works for a wood burner company um but he said that campaigns and you know as you said ed milliband sort of drive against people using wood burners has sort of brought the prices down so he said during covid people loved wood burners and they were sort of flying off the shelves prices were going up um but now they've fallen about 30 percent So you might have paid£2 ,000 for a 5kWh wood burner a few years ago, and now you could pay£1 ,500 for that.

45:05Helen Crane: So, you know, if you're willing to put the work in, it could actually be quite economical. So the kind of things that Toby does to make his a bit more eco-friendly. So he says that looking at the type of wood burner you buy is really important. and actually 1.9 million people apparently still use it. So they are still, you know, relatively popular. Burning wood, he says, is a carbon neutral form of energy. Logs on the fire apparently release a similar amount of carbon dioxide as a tree absorbed when it's growing. It's important to look out for an efficient burner because that will be more cost effective and it will have less emissions or obviously exposure to, you know, this kind of stuff over the long term.

45:49Helen Crane: If it has high emissions, can be sort of harmful to your health. So the burn-up that he has has passed eco-design regulations, which means that it burns things efficiently and the air is sort of circulated inside. So it burns in a way that heats the home more quickly. And it also has a sealed glass door to stop pollutants getting out. He also makes sure that the stuff that he burns is sort of dry logs. You're not supposed to burn wet logs because they're worse for the environment. just lots of lots of good little nuggets in here for people who uh who might be looking to do this so instead of using fire light as well toby says that he heats up orange peel in the oven till it dries and then you can use that as a fire lighter which i thought was really interesting so i mean they may be going at a discount but one thing i found uh i have a fireplace and wood is expensive I've noticed because it burns a lot so there's one element if you are thinking of it it may be a discount but actually Woody's rather dear as lovely as it is to Lee's laughing at me there as lovely as it is to sit there on a cold winter's evening with the fire roaring it's expensive anyway Lee stop your laughing give us your tip of the week

47:11Georgie Frost: I was going to say actually it's a really good point Woody it is expensive thank you thank you no and and ideally you would have a way of sourcing it for free but you do have to be really careful about the moisture content and you can get fined if you are burning wood that is too high moisture content so you have as Toby points out here you have to burn logs with a moisture content of less than 20 percent and if you get caught not doing that the department for environment food and rural rural affairs can issue a 300 pound penalty uh he owns a 20 pound handheld log moisture meter uh where you can check with a short level of moisture and it's really important that you know you do that not only for your health but potentially for your pocket and for the environment and the planet and also there's been a massive move in recent years towards these eco design stoves that are up to 80 percent more efficient reducing air pollution and older models and emit 90 percent less particles in an open fire so you have to have all of those things but if you go to like a good um garden center quite often there'll be um you know someone that's selling these in a sort of side unit that know all of the rules and regulations and you're best to go and check out those experts that you know if you if you really want to get one that your home is viable for it and that you're getting a model that is going to be you know worthwhile getting and then if you have an old style one that's in your house making sure that you're getting it serviced and looked at and that it meets current kind of legislations and that it's not damaging your health because fire at the end of the day is something that we've obviously used for a very long time uh to keep us keep us warm um but you do have to be careful anyway my tip of the week sorry i've put the order on there um but i thought it's important that's why you're here that's why you're here before people just start burning in the old logs that they find in the woods um my tip of the week is to think about one of the most unloved uh savings products i think that's out there that actually can be quite a good little home for your cash and these are what i describe as micro fixes little tiny kind of they're not a one-year fix but they're not an easy access but you can get quite good rates on them so for example uh you can get a also notice account so notice accounts in these micro fixes you can get 120 day notice tracker that currently pays 4.5 percent to new customers uh if you go to uh prosper which is a savings platform and it's offered by oak north um there's a boosted one year fix there actually from our at 4.5 percent that's beating everything else that you can currently get out there um and there's also a santander international three-month fixed term account in there paying 4.3 percent um if you go via prosper and get the boost best thing to do it's come to this is money and just search in that little search bar, Prosper.

50:27Georgie Frost: And then if you open an account via our website, you'll get those boosted rates. But it could be a really good little sort of halfway house for your cash outside of the usual routes, fixed rates, easy access, cash register that I think just comes into everyone's mind. There are little niche savings products out there that might give your money a little boost and well worth investigating. Thank you. Lee's tip of the week. Right. Thank you both. Thank you for listening. you can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money news just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app and if you have any comments or questions of the team or anything you'd like them to look into helen you look really comfy there so i just thought i'd ask you um oh god

51:05Helen Crane: what do we say again lee do you remember i remember what we said you can email us a podcast

51:12Georgie Frost: thisismoney.co.uk you can x us at this is money you could also leave a comment on spotify if you wish or you could leave a comment in the podcast article story in which this podcast lives lovely thank you very much and if you like our podcast why not rate us wherever you found us it helps other people find us too