If Reeves wants this trickle of London listings to become a torrent, one reform will help

After the drought, here comes the rain. Well, more of a light drizzle actually, but three flotations or float announcements in the space of a few days will be a relief for the parched London Stock Exchange.

- Nils Pratley

The biggest is Shawbrook, a bank focused on buy-to-let mortgages and lending to small businesses. It was taken off the market in 2017 by a pair of private equity firms, BC Partners and Pollen Street, and should now return by the end of the year with a likely £2bn-ish valuation.

The timing is superficially odd because the talk is of higher taxes on banks in Rachel Reeves's budget next month, but makes sense in other ways. Bank valuations have soared in the past 18 months, helped by a benign climate for bad debts and a backdrop of (slowly) falling interest rates. From the point of view of private equity sellers wishing to cash in a few chips, wider price-to-book valuations count for more than a possible tweak to bank levies.