A weekly briefingfor Sophie.

The Monetary Policy Committee voted 6-3 to hold the base rate at 4.75% on 3 October, with three members — including two external appointees — pushing for a 25 basis point cut. Governor Andrew Bailey acknowledged that inflation has fallen faster than the May forecasts projected, with services CPI now at 5.1% against a 5.5% projection. The split suggests a November cut is more likely than not; gilt markets moved to price a 68% probability by the time the statement landed. The pound slipped 0.4% against the dollar before recovering to 1.312 by Friday's close.

Rachel Reeves published a 47-page strategy on Tuesday setting out how the UK intends to use its post-Brexit regulatory freedoms to attract listings and capital that have drifted to Amsterdam, Dublin and New York since 2016. The centrepiece is a new listing regime consolidating the premium and standard segments into a single ESCC category, with the FCA's prospectus rules simplified by an estimated 40%. A new UK-EU financial services dialogue — the first since withdrawal — will meet quarterly from January. City firms broadly welcomed the direction while noting the timeline: most reforms require primary legislation not expected before 2027.

GlaxoSmithKline reported Q3 revenues of £8.2 billion on 2 October, 12% ahead of consensus, driven by its oncology portfolio — particularly Blenrep (belantamab mafodotin) following its comeback approval in multiple myeloma after the original 2022 withdrawal. Specialty medicines now account for 41% of turnover, up from 28% three years ago. The company raised full-year guidance for the third consecutive quarter and announced a £1 billion accelerated share buyback. Shares reached a 52-week high of 1,812p before settling at 1,784p.

Google DeepMind published a paper in Nature on 30 September describing AlphaProof 2, which solved 39 of 42 problems from the 2024 and 2025 International Mathematical Olympiads at gold-medal standard, up from 28 in the original system. The architecture extends reinforcement learning over Lean 4, the formal proof language, and introduces a new 'proof tree' search that avoids the combinatorial explosion that constrained earlier versions. Olympiad organisers noted that three of the unsolved problems remain open conjectures in the research literature. The practical near-term application DeepMind highlighted is chip verification — formally proving that a hardware design behaves as specified, a task that currently costs Intel and AMD hundreds of engineer-years per product cycle.

Wayve, the London-based AV startup backed by SoftBank and Microsoft, began its first revenue-generating autonomous deliveries on 1 October, operating a fleet of six Renault Kangoo E-Tech vans for Ocado in the Canary Wharf and Isle of Dogs postcodes. A safety driver remains on board, but the system — running Wayve's Embodied AI model trained on 1.4 million miles of UK road data — handles all decisions. The company has a contract to expand to 20 vehicles across four more London boroughs by Q1 2026, with a full driverless operation pending DVLA type-approval expected in mid-2026.

The General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution on 2 October calling for an 'immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire' in Gaza by 143 votes to 11, with 18 abstentions including the United States. The US abstention — rather than a veto in the Security Council — marked a shift in posture from Washington, where the Biden administration is managing competing pressures from Arab-American voters in swing states and its longstanding defence relationship with Israel. The resolution also called for 'unimpeded humanitarian access' and demanded that all parties comply with International Court of Justice interim orders. It has no enforcement mechanism.

Fourteen Pacific Island nations signed the Suva Maritime Agreement on 4 October, redrawing fishing rights and transit arrangements across 30 million square kilometres of ocean. The accord gives Pacific states a 35% share of all catch revenue from vessels operating in their Exclusive Economic Zones, up from 17% under the 1987 Nauru Agreement, and introduces mandatory electronic catch monitoring on all licensed vessels. The US, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — the four largest distant-water fishing nations in the Pacific — all signed companion bilateral arrangements. Analysts at the Lowy Institute called it 'the most significant redistribution of Pacific maritime resources since UNCLOS came into force'.