UK Chancellor Healey will use his budget this week to protect pensioners and those saving for their retirement as he announces plans to shield nearly one million people from paying income tax, according to The Times

• Healy is expected to confirm on Wednesday that the full state pension will rise by GBP 489 to GBP 13,036, and that will be equivalent to a 3.9% rise.

UK budgets built around pension and threshold protection follow a familiar template: the distributional giveaways are trailed in advance, while the market-relevant content sits in the OBR projections and the revised gilt remit rather than in the headline measures. The triple-lock-style uprating flagged here is the known expensive commitment, and shielding pensioners from income tax via frozen personal allowances is the established political mechanism, since static thresholds against rising state pensions otherwise drag recipients into the net. Episodes of this kind have tended to matter for the gilt curve through the financing arithmetic, not the pensions detail itself: what has moved long-end yields on UK budget days historically is any upward revision to issuance, unfunded giveaways, or a deterioration in the debt path, with the market having shown it punishes fiscal slippage quickly. The distinction worth drawing is between measures that redistribute and measures that borrow; the first is largely neutral for the curve, the second steepens it. The follow-ons are the OBR's growth and borrowing forecasts, the Debt Management Office remit, and whether the Chancellor's headroom against the fiscal rules narrows, which has been the recurring fault line in recent UK fiscal events. As a pre-briefed item, much of the politics is already priced; the OBR document is the live risk.