Jamie Dimon joins bankers lobbying UK ahead of Autumn budget

Bankers are piling pressure on the British government ahead of its Autumn Budget, in which the newly minted leadership will lay out its fiscal plans for Britain.

Finance minister John Healey is set to unveil his first budget on Oct. 28. Among the policy shifts reportedly on the table is a windfall tax aimed at banks and oil companies.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon met with Healey at Downing Street on Wednesday, when he is reported to have also held talks with the U.K.’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

Burnham — who is widely perceived as more left-leaning than his predecessor Keir Starmer, despite being from the same political party — appointed Healey to replace Rachel Reeves as Chancellor of the Exchequer shortly after his ascension to the top job.

The pair are tasked with bringing public spending and borrowing under control, with sticky inflation, elevated government borrowing costs and lackluster economic growth adding to the urgency of balancing the books.

But they have also said easing living costs, devolving political power to local authorities and raising defense spending remain priorities. While the government has identified some savings to help fund its defense plans, Burnham and Healey have yet to spell out the full mix of further savings or tax measures needed to pay for the additional expenditure while sticking to the U.K.’s so-called fiscal rules.

According to British media, Dimon warned the pair on Wednesday against raising the tax burden on banks in next month’s budget.

In the U.K., banks already pay the standard 25% corporation tax plus a 3% bank surcharge, an additional bank levy on balance sheets of between 0.05% and 0.1%, as well as general business taxes such as National Insurance on staff wages, sales tax and business rates — a tax on commercial properties like offices. According to trade body UK Finance, the total tax rate figure for banks’ U.K. operations in 2025 was 46.4%.

Trade unions and some lawmakers have called for the government to tax banks to a greater degree in the wake of bumper earnings in recent years, which were largely driven by an uptick in net interest income — the difference between the interest earned on assets like loans and the interest paid out on liabilities like customer deposits.

But banks have pushed back against those calls.

David Postings, the CEO of UK Finance — a trade body representing hundreds of companies operating in British financial services industry, including Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase — wrote to Healey last month to express the banking sector’s opposition to a windfall tax.

“I am concerned that increasing taxes on banks…