Noise Cancelling with Neil Woodford

Is UK wealth inequality actually rising? Wes Streeting calls inequality "the fracture running through modern Britain", and the coming budget leans on the same story. Neil Woodford has spent weeks in the data, and it says something very different.

In this episode, Neil and Jon work through what the official numbers show: the top 10 percent's share of British wealth was 56 percent in 1980 and 57 percent four decades later, flat through the biggest asset boom in the country's history. They explain why compounding means wealth gaps should widen automatically, and what cancelled it: the occupational pension revolution, faster pay growth at the bottom, and a tax system where the top 1 percent of earners now pay 28 percent of all income tax.

Then the measurement problem. The gap between Britain's richest and poorest fifth is 12 to 1 before taxes and benefits, and 3.3 to 1 after. Same country, same year, same statisticians. Which number you get quoted depends on who is quoting it.

Finally: does inequality actually damage growth? Neil's answer, and what it means for the tax rises now being floated ahead of the budget.

The UK has announced $59 billion of data centre investment since 2023, and the National Grid cannot power it. 140 data centres are sitting in the connection queue asking for 50GW; the UK's peak demand this year was 45GW. In this episode of Noise Cancelling, Jon explains how the grid connection queue actually works, and Neil Woodford explains why he believes this is an energy policy failure decades in the making.

We cover the three things that make the queue unfixable on current policy: connection waits stretching past 2035, why no large gas plant has been built since 2016, and why industrial electricity in the UK costs four times what it does in the US. OpenAI has already put its UK Stargate project on hold.

Then the investor question: if announced capacity is not delivered capacity, where does the capital actually have to go first? Transmission, grid supply chains, nuclear including SMRs, and gas peaking. Watch the queue, watch Ofgem reform, and watch which hyperscale campuses actually break ground.

Neil Woodford says UK interest rates are heading below 3% next year, and the new Prime Minister has almost nothing to do with it. The consensus says Britain has a structural growth problem. The data says something different: the UK economy is waiting on one number.

In this episode, we explain who actually buys Britain. Households account for roughly 60p of every pound of UK GDP, and since the pandemic, they have been saving at nearly double the American rate. British banks now hold over £500 billion more in deposits than they have lent out. That savings mountain, not Westminster rhetoric, is what decides whether Britain grows.

Neil explains why the Bank of England's sticky inflation fears have been wrong all year, why the household savings ratio is the single most important number in the UK economy, and where inflation and interest rates land over the next 12 months. Plus: the sectors that look mispriced if he's right, and the data releases that would confirm the view or kill it.

Neil Woodford on the war the market refuses to price. Missiles are hitting the Gulf, America is back at war, and the S&P 500 finished the week up 1%. The institutions that modelled this conflict predicted catastrophe. The market looked at the same war and said no. One of them is wrong.

Jon and Neil unpack the biggest forecasting failure since Brexit: how the IEA, the Bank of England and the EIA all got the oil shock wrong, and how the market repriced the war line by line while the models stood still. Neil explains why complex economic models fail structurally, what he uses instead (one number, no model), and the scenarios that would prove him wrong, from a Bank of England rate rise to the closure of a second strait.

🔗 Links & Resources

Read Neil's companion piece, Truth Is Ever to Be Found in Simplicity: 

The Noise Cancelling app, new this week: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6784789879 

Visit https://www.noisecancelling.co/apps for more information

About The Noise Cancelling Podcast
Neil Woodford and Jon Adair cut through financial noise: what moved, what it means, and what would change their minds.

Hosts: Neil Woodford, Jon Adair
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ncwithnw

UK stocks are being taken private at a record pace: this year, takeover bids for London-listed companies have run at roughly £60bn against under £600m raised in new IPOs, and Neil Woodford argues that this wave of M&A is the clearest sign in years that UK equities are undervalued. In this episode, Woodford and Jon Adair break down why the FTSE and London stock market trade at such a deep discount to the US, what a 75% takeover premium reveals about UK share prices, whether British stocks are cheap or a value trap, and where Woodford sees value across UK banks, oil and housebuilders.

We posted a companion explainer on the cyclically adjusted PE ratio – what CAPE is, why the US reading of 42x matters, and how to read it: https://www.noisecancelling.co/read/what-the-shiller-cape-tells-you-about-the-next-ten-years