Summer VAT Cut - Children's Meals and Family Attractions Drop to 5% from 25 June
The government's "Great British Summer Savings" scheme cuts VAT from 20% to 5% on children's meals and family attraction tickets between 25 June and 1 September 2026. HMRC published the full guidance via Revenue and Customs Brief 5 (2026) on 21 May, and businesses have three weeks to prepare their tills.
Children's meals qualify if they are served as part of catering (restaurants, cafes, pubs) for consumption on the premises and are marketed, presented and priced as a children's meal. The determining factor is how the meal is sold, not who eats it - an adult ordering from a children's menu still qualifies. Tickets cover children's and family admissions to cinemas, theatres, zoos, museums, adventure parks, soft play, fairs and similar attractions. Standard adult-only tickets to the same venues remain at 20%.
If you run a hospitality or leisure business, the key action is to identify which menu items and ticket types fall in scope and update your POS system before 25 June. The reduced rate applies to the supply date, not the booking date.
Source: GOV.UK - Revenue and Customs Brief 5 (2026) | Related: VAT Calculator
Record PAYE Receipts in April - £52.5 Billion as Fiscal Drag Bites
HMRC's monthly bulletin confirmed that PAYE income tax and National Insurance receipts for April 2026 reached £52.5 billion - the highest ever recorded for the opening month of a financial year and £4.7 billion higher than April 2025. Total tax receipts for the month hit £87.3 billion, up £6.3 billion year-on-year, with VAT alone contributing £20.5 billion.
The Personal Allowance and higher-rate threshold have been frozen at £12,570 and £50,270 since 2021/22 and will stay there until at least April 2028. As wages rise but thresholds do not, more of each pay packet falls into the 20% and 40% bands. The numbers confirm what anyone watching their payslip already suspects: frozen thresholds are a slow-motion tax rise, and six years in, the cumulative effect is substantial.
Source: GOV.UK - HMRC Tax Receipts Monthly Bulletin | Related: Self-Employed Tax Calculator, Real Cost of Living Tool
GOV.UK Chat Now Answers Tax Questions - but Check the Answer
The government's AI chatbot, GOV.UK Chat, is now live on the GOV.UK app and has been answering tax questions since its soft launch on 26 March. Demand has been strongest for tax, driving and benefits queries, with over 15,000 questions asked in the first weeks. GDS says the tool draws from HMRC's published guidance on GOV.UK.
The catch: GOV.UK Chat claims 90% accuracy, which means roughly one in ten responses does not match official guidance in every detail. Within hours of the wider launch, tax experts found it giving incorrect answers on the £100,000 tax-free childcare cliff edge and wrongly suggesting a personal MacBook sale could attract capital gains tax. It does not draw from HMRC's internal manuals, so complex questions are outside its scope. As a starting point for simple queries it has potential, but treat every answer as a prompt to verify, not a final answer.
Source: ICAEW - Government's AI Chatbot Now Available for Tax Queries | Related: How Much to Set Aside for Your Tax Bill
Stablecoins May Be Taxed as Interest, Not Capital Gains
ICAEW has backed the government's proposal to treat returns on stablecoins as interest rather than capital gains in its response to the call for evidence on a possible new stablecoin tax regime. Currently, stablecoin yields are taxed under the capital gains rules alongside other cryptoassets. Treating them as interest would align their tax treatment with the bank deposit they economically resemble - and would mean returns fall within the £1,000 personal savings allowance (basic rate) or £500 (higher rate) rather than the £3,000 CGT annual exempt amount.
No draft legislation has been published yet, and the FCA's separate consultation on the wider UK cryptoasset regulatory perimeter (CP26/13) closed on 3 June with final guidance expected in September. Anyone holding stablecoins for yield should watch both tracks - the tax treatment and the regulatory classification are moving in parallel.
Source: ICAEW - Consider Treating Stablecoins as Money for Tax Purposes | Related: Shares and Crypto CGT Calculator
Key Dates
18 June 2026 (Thursday) - Bank of England MPC decision. Bank Rate currently 3.75%. April CPI at 2.8% gives the committee room to cut, but the vote was 8-1 to hold in April.
25 June 2026 (Thursday) - Summer VAT cut starts. Children's meals and family attraction tickets drop to 5% VAT until 1 September.
6 July 2026 - P11D deadline for 2025/26 benefits-in-kind, for employers not using payrolled BIKs.
31 July 2026 - Second payment on account for 2025/26 Self Assessment.