Bots took your RAYE ticket — and Parliament just blinked on the resale cap

The rise in one paragraph The Bank of England raised Bank Rate from 3.75% to 4% on Thursday 5 November 2026, announced at noon. The Monetary Policy Committee voted 8 to 1 in favour, with Catherine Mann the one dissenter, wanting a bigger rise to 4.25%. It is the first Bank of England rate rise since August 2023. The Bank had held at 3.75% at its three previous meetings, on 18 June, 30 July and 17 September 2026. It moved because inflation is too high: CPI inflation was 3.5% in the year to September 2026, against the Bank’s 2% target, and the Bank expects it to peak at around 5% by mid-2027. The next decision is on 17 December 2026. If you are saving for your first home, here is what it means and what to do about it. Where mortgage rates stand today Fixed rates were already high before Thursday, because lenders price on what they expect the Bank to do. Moneyfacts put the average two-year fixed rate at 5.97% and the average five-year fixed rate at 5.99% just before the decision, and the average rate on new mortgages at 5.89%, its highest since November 2023. At the start of the year the average two-year fixed rate was 4.83%, so on a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years that adds roughly £170 a month compared with a deal taken out in January. The best deals are lower, but only with a big deposit. Mortgage Advice Bureau figures updated on 5 November put the best two-year fixed rate at 4.78% and the best five-year fixed rate at 4.78%, both from Halifax at 60% loan-to-value, which means a 40% deposit. The best two-year tracker was 3.99%, also from Halifax at 60% loan-to-value. With a 10% deposit or less, expect a higher rate. The average standard variable rate, the rate you land on if your deal ends and you do nothing, was 7.13% before the decision. What the rise does to your monthly payment If you already have a tracker mortgage, your payment will go up within days. As a guide, a 0.25% rise on a £200,000 repayment mortgage over 25 years adds about £29 a month, or about £348 a year. On a £250,000 mortgage over the same term, a 0.25% rise adds about £37 a month. If you are on a fixed rate, nothing changes until your deal ends. That is the point of fixing. But the rate you will be offered when you remortgage or buy is set by the market now, and the market has already moved. More than 2.3 million households come off fixed deals during 2027. For them, the rate on offer in the next few months matters more than the one they locked in years ago. Fixed or tracker? There is no single right answer, and this article is general information, not financial advice. A fixed rate gives you certainty: your payment stays the same for two or five years, whatever the Bank does next. A tracker follows Bank Rate, so your payment moves up or down with it. Right now the average two-year tracker is around 4.68%, below the average two-year fixed rate of 5.97%. That gap is the market betting rates will fall again. If they do, a tracker wins. If the Bank raises rates again, it loses. Ask three questions. First, could you still pay if your rate went up another 0.5%? If not, certainty matters more than a lower starting rate. Second, how long will you stay? If you may move in two years, a two-year fix or a tracker with no early repayment charge keeps your options open. Third, does the deal charge a fee? A cheap-looking rate with a £1,999 fee can cost more than a slightly higher rate with no fee. Work out the total cost over the deal, not just the headline rate. Your First Home: what to do before February The Your First Home scheme does not change because of Thursday’s decision. It is a government equity loan scheme for first-time buyers in England, backed by £4.7 billion over five years. You put down a deposit of between 2.5% and 15%, the government lends you 20% of the price through an equity loan that is interest free for five years, and a normal repayment mortgage covers the rest. Income caps are £110,000 outside London and £140,000 inside London, with price caps of £650,000 in inner London and £500,000 in outer London. Pre-registration opens by the end of December 2026, applications open in February 2027, and the first loans are expected from April 2027. If you plan to apply in February, the rate picture then matters more than this week’s. Oxford Economics expects Bank Rate to reach 4.25% by February 2027. That is a forecast, not a fact. But run your numbers at 4.25% and at 4.5%, not only at today’s rate, before you decide what you can afford. Do the groundwork now: check your credit file for errors, gather three months of payslips and bank statements, and ask a lender for a decision in principle. It costs nothing, and it tells you roughly what you can borrow. Five things to do this week First, if you already have a mortgage, find out when your deal ends and what type it is. If it ends within six months, ask your lender about locking in early; you can often switch to a cheaper deal before it starts if rates fall. Second, if you are saving for a deposit, check your savings rate: the average easy-access rate was 2.56% before the decision, below inflation of 3.5%, so compare accounts and switch when your provider falls behind. The Cash ISA limit stays at £20,000. Third, do not drift onto the standard variable rate. Set a reminder for the month your deal ends. On a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years, the average SVR of 7.13% works out at about £1,788 a month, against about £1,606 on the average two-year fixed rate:…

The decision in one paragraph The Bank of England raised Bank Rate from 3.75% to 4% on Thursday 5 November 2026, announced at noon. The Monetary Policy Committee voted 8 to 1 in favour. The one dissenter, Catherine Mann, wanted a bigger rise, to 4.25%. It is the first Bank of England rate rise since August 2023. The Bank is acting because inflation is too high: Consumer Prices Index inflation was 3.5% in the year to September 2026, well above the Bank’s 2% target, and the Bank expects inflation to peak at around 5% by mid-2027. The next decision is on 17 December 2026. This article explains what the rise means for your mortgage, your savings, your side hustle and your first home. Why the Bank raised rates The Bank’s job is to keep inflation at 2%. It is not at 2%, and it is moving the wrong way: CPI inflation was 3.5% in the year to September 2026, up from 3.1% in August, the highest in almost a year. Energy prices are the main driver, with the Middle East conflict pushing up gas and oil prices and the energy price cap rising by £60 a year to £1,723 on 1 October. The Bank also fears second-round effects, where higher prices feed into higher wages and business costs, and the Budget‘s minimum wage rise adds to business costs. The committee was already split. At its last meeting, on 17 September, it voted 6 to 3 to hold at 3.75%, with Megan Greene, Catherine Mann and Huw Pill voting to raise it to 4% there and then. On Thursday the committee moved decisively, 8 to 1, and the dissent is now in the other direction: Mann wanted to go further, to 4.25%. What it means for your mortgage Tracker and standard variable rate mortgages usually change soon after a base rate move. As a guide, a 0.25% rise adds about £42 a month for every £200,000 owed on an interest-only mortgage, and slightly less on a repayment mortgage, because the bank recalculates your payment on the time left on your loan. So if you owe £200,000 on a tracker, budget for roughly £40 a month more; if you owe £100,000, roughly £20. These are guides, not quotes. Your lender will confirm your exact new payment. Fixed-rate mortgages do not change: if you are mid-deal, your payments stay as they are until it ends. But new fixed deals have already been repriced all autumn, because lenders price on what they expect the base rate to do. Before Thursday’s decision, the average rate on new mortgages had risen to 5.89%, according to Moneyfacts, and the average two-year fixed rate had risen from 4.83% in January to 5.97%, its highest since December 2023. On a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years, that adds £169 a month compared with a deal taken out at the start of 2026. The people most exposed are those coming to the end of a fixed deal. Remortgage approvals rose to 42,600 from 34,000 in August, suggesting many homeowners are locking in early. The thing to avoid is drifting onto your lender’s standard variable rate: the average SVR was 7.13% before the decision, which on a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years works out at £1,788 a month, against £1,606 on the average two-year fixed rate. That is £182 a month for doing nothing. What it means for savers A rise should be good news for savers, but how much you benefit depends on your account and how quickly your provider passes the increase on. Providers are not required to pass it on in full, and timing varies. Variable-rate accounts, such as easy access accounts, can change at any time, so check whether your rate has risen. Fixed-rate accounts do not change once opened. With inflation at 3.5%, money in a low-paying account is losing spending power, so compare accounts and switch when your provider’s rate falls behind. The Cash ISA limit stays at £20,000. What it means for your side hustle Borrowing gets more expensive: a loan, credit card or overdraft to buy stock or equipment now costs more in interest, so price that into your margins before you borrow to fund a hustle. The Budget gave side hustlers something concrete in return: the trading allowance rises from £1,000 to £3,000 from 6 April 2027, the amount you can earn from casual self-employment before you have to declare it for tax. The message is the same either way: build the hustle from what you earn, not from what you borrow. What it means for your first home The rate decision does not change the Your First Home scheme itself. The scheme, announced in the Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026, is a government equity loan scheme for first-time buyers in England, backed by £4.7 billion over five years. You put down a deposit of between 2.5% and 15%, the government lends you 20% of the price through an equity loan that is interest free for five years, and a normal repayment mortgage covers the rest. Income caps are £110,000 outside London and £140,000 inside London, with price caps of £650,000 in inner London and £500,000 in outer London. Pre-registration opens by the end of December 2026, full applications open in February 2027, and the first loans are expected from April 2027. None of those details moves because of Thursday. What does move is the mortgage part: a higher base rate usually means a higher mortgage rate, a higher monthly payment on the same home, and a lower amount a lender may be willing to lend. The deposit scheme lowers one barrier, while rising rates raise another. The practical point is timing. If you plan to apply in February 2027, the rate picture then matters more than the rate picture on Thursday. Oxford Economics expects the base rate at 4.25% by February 2027. That is a forecast, not a fact, but run your numbers at 4.25% and at 4.5%, not only…

The Budget in one paragraph On 28 October 2026, Chancellor John Healey delivered the Autumn Budget. It contained three measures that speak directly to young people: a new scheme to help first-time buyers, more room to test a side hustle without a tax bill, and a rise in the minimum wage. None of them changes anything overnight. All of them reward people who start preparing now. This article explains each measure in plain English, with the figures as announced. It is general information, not financial advice, and some details still need legislation before they become law. Your First Home: a smaller deposit, with strings attached Your First Home is a new government scheme for first-time buyers in England, backed by £4.7 billion of government funding over five years. It works like this. You buy a new-build home from a developer signed up to the scheme. You put down a deposit of between 2.5% and 15% of the price. The government lends you 20% of the price through an equity loan. A normal repayment mortgage from a participating lender covers the rest. An equity loan is different from a normal loan. The government owns a share of your home equal to the loan. When you sell, you repay 20% of the sale price, so if your home rises in value, the amount you repay rises too. If it falls in value, the amount falls. The loan is interest free for the first five years. After that, interest starts at 1.5% in year six and rises to 3% from year seven. To see how the numbers fit together, take an illustrative home priced at £250,000. A 2.5% deposit is £6,250. The government equity loan of 20% is £50,000. The mortgage covers the remaining £193,750. There are limits. Your household income must be no more than £110,000 outside London, or £140,000 inside London. Price caps apply, set by local authority median prices, with inner London capped at £650,000 and outer London at £500,000. The home must be a new build, bought as your main home, from a participating developer. Existing homes are not eligible, and the scheme covers England only. The timetable matters. Pre-registration is due to open by the end of December 2026, full applications open in February 2027, and the first loans are expected from April 2027. A new First Time Buyer ISA was also announced, but its details are still being worked through, so we are not quoting figures for it here. The trading allowance: more room to test an idea From 6 April 2027, the trading allowance rises from £1,000 to £3,000. The trading allowance is the amount of trading and miscellaneous income you can receive in a year without paying tax on it and without needing to declare it. It covers things like freelance work, selling online, and small services, where the activity amounts to trading. Here is what that means in practice. Suppose you earn £2,400 in a year from selling designs online alongside your job. Under the old £1,000 allowance, £1,400 of that income sat above the allowance. Under the new £3,000 allowance, the whole £2,400 sits within it. That is the difference between testing an idea and doing paperwork about testing an idea. A few rules are worth knowing. The allowance applies per person, not per trade, so two side incomes share one £3,000 allowance. It is an alternative to deducting your actual business expenses, not an addition to them: if your expenses are more than £3,000, deducting the real expenses may leave you better off. The allowance cannot create a tax loss, and it does not cover a trade carried on in partnership, or income paid by your employer. It starts on 6 April 2027, so it does not change this tax year. Keep records from day one anyway. Good records are what turn a side hustle into a business a bank or a funder will take seriously. Wages: the floor rises in April 2027 From 1 April 2027, the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over rises by 3.9%, from £12.71 to £13.21 an hour. The rate for 18 to 20 year olds rises to £11.27 an hour, and the rate for 16 to 17 year olds and apprentices rises to £8.31 an hour. The Budget document puts the gain at £910 a year in gross pay for a full-time worker on the adult rate. If you are employed, that is a straightforward pay rise, and it is worth checking your April 2027 payslip to make sure it arrived. If you run a small team, it is a cost to budget for now, not a surprise to meet in April. Saving: the Cash ISA limit stays at £20,000 Savers got a reprieve. A planned cut to the Cash ISA limit, down to £12,000 for under 65s from April 2027, will not go ahead. The annual Cash ISA limit stays at £20,000 from 6 April 2027, within the overall £20,000 ISA allowance. The government has said amending regulations will be laid to give effect to this, so treat the position as announced rather than already law. One change does bite: tax on savings interest held outside an ISA rises from 6 April 2027, to 24% at the basic rate, 44% at the higher rate and 49% at the additional rate. If you are saving for a deposit, the order of operations stays the same: build the habit, use tax sheltered saving where you can, and keep the deposit money somewhere you can reach it when the right home appears. What to do now First, if a first home is your goal, work out your deposit target under the new scheme and check whether the price caps and income caps fit your area. Second, if you have a side hustle idea, use the months before April 2027 to test it small, keep records, and keep your income and expenses in a separate account so the numbers are clean. Third, if you are…

A Nollywood premiere in the West End On 29 November 2026, a Nollywood film will premiere at ODEON Luxe Leicester Square in London. The Four: No One Fights Alone, written, directed and produced by Funke Akindele through her company Funke Akindele Network, and distributed by FilmOne Entertainment, will be the first Nollywood title to premiere at the venue. The film then opens in cinemas on 11 December 2026. It tells the story of four women who fight for the future of a young man they love, and it stars Akindele alongside Bisola Aiyeola, Chioma Akpotha, Waje, Richard Mofe-Damijo, Timini Egbuson and Lateef Adedimeji, among others. For UK audiences, this is a sign of how far African screen storytelling has travelled. Akindele’s previous film, Behind the Scenes, released in 2025, made more than 2 billion naira, roughly 1.6 million dollars, and was streamed on Netflix, reaching viewers far beyond Nigeria. Her films have topped the Nigerian box office for three consecutive years, and A Tribe Called Judah, from 2023, was the first Nollywood film to make 1 billion naira at the box office. The London premiere, announced with promotional support from Facebook, is part of a deliberate strategy to bring Nigerian cinema to international audiences. But a premiere is the visible end of a long chain of business decisions. The financing, the rights, the distribution deals, the music licensing and the brand partnerships all happen long before the red carpet. That chain is exactly what CANEX WKND 2026, opening in Lagos on 5 November, is built to strengthen. For UK readers who enjoy African film, music and fashion, CANEX explains how the work you love gets made, paid for and protected. What CANEX is CANEX WKND 2026 runs from Thursday 5 November to Sunday 8 November 2026 at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts, inside the National Theatre complex in Iganmu, Lagos. It is the flagship weekend of the Creative Africa Nexus, run by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), in partnership with the Federal Government of Nigeria, the African Union Commission and the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat. This is the first time Nigeria has hosted it. The theme is “One People, United in Culture, Creating for the World: From FESTAC ’77 to CANEX ’27”, recalling the 1977 Lagos festival that gathered Black creatives from around the world. The programme covers film, music, fashion, literature, visual arts, gastronomy and sport. There are exhibitions, a fashion show and awards night, film screenings, a concert, a food competition and a legends football match. At its centre is a business programme: a finance summit, a deal room, intellectual property sessions, masterclasses and networking for people who make their living from creative work. For a UK reader, the simplest way to understand CANEX is as a trade fair for culture. Just as a book fair is where publishers buy and sell the rights to books, CANEX is where filmmakers, musicians, designers and investors meet to do deals, learn the rules of the business, and connect African creative work with buyers and audiences around the world, including in Britain. The business behind the premiere The Thursday programme in Lagos shows what the business side looks like in practice. The Creative Economy Finance Summit runs from 10am to 3pm West Africa Time, presented by Afreximbank with the Creative Economy Practice at Co-Creation Hub. It is invitation only, and it is followed by a session on financing African intellectual property. A separate intellectual property summit covers the rights through which creators control the use and commercial distribution of their work. Its sessions map directly onto the journey of a film like The Four. The music roundtable addresses royalties and revenue, which covers how the songs in a film are paid for and how their writers earn. The film and television session covers production rights, distribution and cross-border licensing, which is the legal framework that allows a Nigerian film to premiere in London and then open in cinemas worldwide. The fashion discussion covers design protection, counterfeiting and brand rights, which matters when a film’s costumes and styling inspire fashion far beyond the screen. Another roundtable covers brand deals, content made with artificial intelligence, and digital monetisation, all of which shape how a modern film release earns money beyond ticket sales. The CANEX Deal Room, running from 5 to 7 November, lets creative projects pitch directly to financiers and investors. It is access controlled, but its purpose is plain: creative businesses need capital, and capital needs to see clear ownership, clear earnings and clear plans. The CANEX Music Business Lab and Songwriting Camp, run with the Creative Industries Initiative for Africa, follows a song from writing to earning. Its masterclasses cover songwriting credits, split sheets, registering work, choosing a distributor, royalties, publishing, sync licensing and brand deals. Sync licensing, the use of a song in a film, advert or series, is one of the quiet ways music earns, and it is directly relevant to a film soundtrack. The original song “My Sunshine”, by Waje and Shoday, was released from the soundtrack of The Four ahead of the film’s December release, a reminder that a film’s music is a business in its own right. Why this matters to UK audiences and UK creatives African creative work is no longer a niche interest in Britain. Afrobeats fills UK charts and festivals. Nollywood films reach UK audiences through cinemas and streaming. African fashion appears on London runways and high streets. The UK premiere of The Four at Leicester Square is part of that story, and it raises practical questions for British readers too. For audiences, CANEX is a guide to what to watch next. The filmmakers, musicians and designers meeting in Lagos this week are the people whose work will reach UK screens, speakers and shops in the coming years. Akindele’s fireside chat at CANEX, scheduled for Friday 6 November in Live Theatre 1 from 2pm to 2.45pm, and the sessions with American actress Uzo Aduba and Nobel…