UK Chancellor Healey has reportedly summoned UK bank CEOs for a pre-budget summit, Sky News reports

Pre-budget summoning of bank CEOs fits an established pattern in UK fiscal cycles: governments have historically canvassed the sector ahead of budgets when revenue measures aimed at banks are under active consideration, and the tax-treatment question is the standard context for such meetings. The precedent to watch is the bank levy and surcharge framework, which has been adjusted on multiple past occasions, often trailed by exactly this kind of engagement; windfall-style levies on sectors with elevated earnings have also been floated in comparable fiscal positions. The transmission channel for UK domestics such as Lloyds and NatWest is direct and earnings-level, via the tax line, while internationally weighted names like HSBC and Barclays have historically been less sensitive to domestic surcharge changes given their revenue mix. The distinction worth drawing is between consultation and notification: in past episodes, summits of this kind have sometimes preceded measures already decided, sometimes served to soften the ground, and the tone of subsequent Treasury readouts has been the tell. Follow-ons are the budget documentation itself, any mention of the surcharge or levy rate in pre-briefing, and whether building societies or challenger banks are drawn into the same conversation, which has signalled broader scope in the past. Until the fiscal event, positioning in the domestic bank peer set has tended to reflect the probability of a tax change rather than its size.