Are Jeremy Hunt’s plans really a ‘Budget for growth’?

This is an audio transcript of the Payne’s Politics podcast episode: ‘Are Jeremy Hunt’s plans really a ‘Budget for growth’?’

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George Parker
If you believe the chancellor, it’s all rosy on the economic front.

Jeremy Hunt
In the face of enormous challenges, I report today on a British economy which is proving the doubters wrong. (MPs react)

George Parker
Jeremy Hunt unveiled his spring Budget this week and arrived in the House of Commons with new official forecasts showing the UK would avoid a technical recession this year. But Labour’s Keir Starmer wasn’t buying it.

Keir Starmer
The more that he pretends everything is fine, the more he shows just how out of touch they are. (MPs react) We know the Tory cupboard is as bare as the salad aisle in our supermarket. (MPs react) The lettuces may be out, but the turnips are in.

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George Parker
Welcome to Payne’s Politics, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times, with me, George Parker, carrying on with my little side hustle while we complete plans for a pod relaunch. Coming up, we’ll be dissecting the Budget and the cost of living crisis with the FT’s economics editor Chris Giles and Torsten Bell, CEO of the Resolution Foundation. And we’ll be looking at the Budget’s winners, including the wealthy few who can take advantage of Jeremy Hunt’s £1bn pension tax bond with the FT’s consumer editor, Claer Barrett, and our political commentator Stephen Bush.

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Jeremy Hunt delivered a defiantly upbeat Budget this week. Economic stability had been restored, he argued, and the declinists were wrong, the optimists right. And he told parliament the independent forecast by the Office of Budget Responsibility showed that while the country wasn’t exactly booming — in fact, the economy is going to shrink this year — it would avoid a technical recession.

Jeremy Hunt
They forecast . . . They . . . They forecast we will meet the prime minister’s priorities to halve inflation, reduce debt and get the economy growing. We are following the plan and the plan is working. (MPs react)

George Parker
Well, is it working? I’m joined by Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation and the FT’s economics editor, Chris Giles. Chris, in a nutshell, what did the Budget and the OBR forecast tell us about the state of the British economy?

Chris Giles
Well, in a nutshell, it told us it was a bit better than we thought or feared last autumn, but still pretty weak and pretty depressing when we’re looking forward. So if you take the whole period from the end of 2019 to the end of the forecast, the average growth rate in that whole period is 1 per cent. The average growth rate before the financial crisis of 2007, 2008 was 2.75 per cent. So economic performance for quite a long time is weak. They say that the growth rate might be able to get to 1.75 per cent, but still way below what we’ve been used to in the UK. So the big picture is, with low growth it’s much harder to finance all the things that we want government to do and that’s why the public finances are still pretty stretched.

George Parker
And we’re seeing the highest tax burden since the war in this very big squeeze in living standards, partly caused by the so-called stealth tax — the freezing of allowances and thresholds.

Chris Giles
Absolutely. So we’re seeing a very high tax burden in historic terms, not in international terms. This is happening everywhere so we should be really clear about that and we have to get used to it. We’ve got an ageing society, we’ve got more demands on health and other things that we want government to be doing. Money doesn’t come from nowhere. We’ll have to be paying tax, more tax, if we want these public services or we have to decide we don’t want these public services. And I don’t think that’s where the public is.

George Parker
And Torsten, I mean there is all this talk about the highest tax burden since the second world war. Where do we fit into the, say, for example, the European league table on tax burdens or the share of GDP?

Torsten Bell
We’re pretty middle of the pack. We’re lower than most large northern European economies, but we’re obviously significantly higher than the United States. I think I would separate out two different things that are going on. There’s long-term upward pressure on the size of the state from becoming an older society, but then there are shorter-term reasons why we’ve ended up with a Conservative government leading to the largest tax burden in 70 years. And those two reasons are higher debt interest bills. We thought we were paying, you know, 2 per cent of GDP less under interest than we now are. Well, that’s higher taxes to pay for that or big cuts to public services we’re not doing. And the second reason is that Rishi Sunak — back when he was the chancellor — announced in cash terms quite a large increase in spending and then the economy is smaller. So the spending as a share of GDP ended up being bigger than he was planning. And so the effect of those two things together is around 4 per cent of GDP, higher spending than people thought was normal. And then the taxes are going up to do with that and they’re mainly going up on middle and higher-income households, mainly for the reasons Chris is talking about in terms of freezes to the income tax threshold. There’s a lightly ridiculous debate in Westminster, which is like half the Conservative party saying that the other half is going ideologically soft, and why aren’t they just cutting taxes, slightly ignoring the fact that you can’t stop global interest rates having gone up and you’ve got to pay that debt interest bill and you already announced the spending totals that you were planning. So you had to actually cut public spending to stop this increase in the size of the state in the short term. So long-term drivers and then some short-term, really big increase in the size of the state.

George Parker
Ever since the actual statement itself, you’ve been quite positive Torsten, haven’t you, about some of the individual measures in the Budget.

Torsten Bell
Well, it’s always good to be positive in life where you can, George, It’s been a pretty . . . 

George Parker
You’re getting to be a declinist.

Torsten Bell
You definitely must never be a declinist. I always say to people the best reason not to be declinist is that Britain’s had a terrible 15 years. So law of averages, the future should be better. There’s some catch-up potential to be had. And that’s true in life for people and in countries.

George Parker
You get philosophy on this podcast for free.

Torsten Bell
And there’s no charge for that. Now, on the measures in the Budget — I’m a balanced man, so I have a balanced view on the packages — I think one, there’s more of them than people were expecting and they’re bigger. Some of them, particularly on the employment side, even if I don’t agree with all the individual measures, there’s like a coherent package. He’s focusing on the groups that could plausibly increase their employment rates — that is, mothers, older workers and those in ill health. And they’re the ones that history tells us have seen increases in their employment rates in response to policy. The big stuff is happening on childcare where you’ve got a really significant change affecting a minority of the population, those with kids aged nine months up to three years, but for them it’s a very big deal. So more people going straight back to work after maternity leave. I think it’ll have some effect on that front. The bigger effect is boosting the living standards of everybody else who is probably already working, many of whom would have been using childcare. But that’s really material. And yes, that will mainly be benefiting middle- and higher-income households. But it will also be, if you think about it in lifecycle terms, helping people in one of the most difficult, expensive phases of life.

George Parker
Chris, but how does the Treasury regard childcare? I mean, most of us would think it’s a good thing that government is providing both free in inverted commas childcare. But the Treasury has always been rather sceptical about this, hasn’t it?

Chris Giles
It has, because it’s taken a very, very clear but rather limited efficiency argument to it. And so, Torsten, you’ve been talking about the benefits in terms of giving a group in society who are struggling some more money and thinking that that’s a good thing. In terms of whether it actually helps people into work, all the evidence is that it’s very expensive and doesn’t have a big effect. Doesn’t have no effect, but the idea that it pays for itself, well, I’ve seen some reports at the moment recently saying that complete nonsense. There’s a thing in economics which is a horrible thing, it’s called deadweight loss. And it’s huge in all of these policies, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the policy, let’s be absolutely clear. But it means that, for people who are already working and paying for childcare, they just get the cash and they are a much, much bigger group than the people you persuade to go in to work because of the cash. And that makes the finances and on pure efficiency grounds always look quite bad. And that’s why the Treasury has never really liked this policy.

George Parker
Later in the podcast, we’ll look in more detail at the pension tax bung, some people have called it, £1bn. Seems to be a bit of a theme in this Budget. The chancellor’s spending an awful lot of money to try to get people back into work, but not that many people compared with the amount of money he’s spending.

Chris Giles
Absolutely. And if you do a traditional cost per job type of analysis, it’s in the £80,000 range for both the childcare and the pension reforms. And so if you are the Treasury and you look just at that, then you say both of these reforms are things we don’t want to do. And the question then is, is whether you think that these groups are people that society should be giving more money to, and there’ll be quite a lot of people who will say that maybe the childcare aspect of that is more deserving than the rich older workers. The lifetime pension allowance is a very, very strange tax rule and you could say for efficiency grounds it’s worth getting rid of that, but maybe not at the same time then increasing the annual allowance because both are going up by a lot means you’re giving a lot of money to rich people.

George Parker
Can I be cynical here, Torsten — is it possible that he’s put this inactivity program up in lights and chucked billions of pounds getting people back into work -- I think the OBR forecasts about 110,000 — to give him some political cover to do the thing that will boost economic growth much more quickly and effectively, which is opening the doors to more immigration?

Torsten Bell
And I think he genuinely is trying to raise economic activity rates. And some of these policies are also good things to do for other reasons. We’ve discussed why that might be the case on childcare. So I don’t think you should be completely cynical. I mean, on migration, to be fair, I mean, Jeremy Hunt obviously has a more positive view of migration than some of his Conservative colleagues. But you know, the migration rate hasn’t been revised up because Jeremy Hunt exists. It’s been revised up because the migrants exist that have been coming here in greater numbers actually since Brexit. And the ONS has updated its migration assumptions and the OBR’s just taking those as a given.

Chris Giles
One thing I think we should always remember, and we should be a little bit humble when we’re looking at economic analysis on the numbers of people that go in as a result of these sorts of policies is the numbers are always very small. I remember when in my first job I did this sort of thing called family credit. We were looking at changing the hours rule on family credit and we were very pleased. We got a number of 30,000 more people would be working full-time because of a boring change. And it went to the Bank of England. I remember going presenting it at the Bank of England and a then-chief economist of the Bank of England, rather witheringly said, “30,000? Yes, that’s just like one good month of unemployment numbers”. And it is. And that we should always remember that there’s other things going on in the economy.

Torsten Bell
Although the big macro economy moves around policy can in lots of areas only affect the margins.

George Parker
Yeah, and it’s worth saying, have we made a bit of progress in the right direction?

Chris Giles
No, absolutely. But also just saying that the UK hasn’t got a terrible record on participation in the labour market anyway in levels terms and without doing things like that, we’ve managed to push it up quite a lot over the last decade or so. So don’t get too hung up on the 110,000. It could be much higher than that because economics isn’t very good at explaining why these numbers change. And when you do the models, you always get very small numbers.

George Parker
Torsten, what would you have done differently?

Torsten Bell
How long we got? Right. I mean, there’s things that are just kinda bit silly in the Budget. So the chancellor was obviously under pressure because he’s overseeing a big rise in the headline rate of corporation tax in a few weeks’ time. Yes, he’s going ahead with that rise, but he’s giving big companies in particular that invest bigger reliefs on their spending on some kinds of investment.

It’s the opposite direction that George Osborne took us for the last decade, but it’s a move broadly in the right direction. But he’s done it for a temporary three years. So that means the only effect of it is to bring forward investment rather than to actually raise it, which is what this country needs to do. And he’s done that for pretty silly reasons, which is he doesn’t want to have to raise any taxes to pay for the cost of that investment incentive at the back end of the forecast period. That’s now the fifth short-term change to the corporation tax regime in the last two years. And one thing businesses like almost as much as they like low corporate taxes is certainty about their corporate taxes. And we keep fiddling and he’s done it again.

On childcare, I think the package is broadly good. We focused on the middle-class bit of the package, the 30 free hours for one- and two-year-olds. Actually, there’s a good change to the universal credit system as well. Paying childcare support up front rather than in arrears is less good on the moves on older workers. That’s what Chris is talking about. In terms of the pension tax reform, I think it’s pretty hard to justify such a focus of your, what you called a bung to some of the wealthiest people. I think you’ve got two options: either big reform that reduces the generosity of the system in other ways to higher income households, more restrictions on the tax-free lump sum dealing definitely with the fact that you can pass your pension pot on inheritance tax-free to your heirs. If you do those kind of things, then you can start getting rid of the lifetime allowance without worrying you’re giving loads of money to rich people. But we haven’t done that really, except this will matter for politics in the next 10 years. He’s for the first time has introduced a cash cap on the scale of a tax-free lump sum.

Chris Giles
Yes, that will come down. That will never be raised ever again.

Torsten Bell
It’s going to get reduced. A Labour government in a few years’ time will be reducing that because it’s £250,000 tax-free. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. So I wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing there. You either do big reform or you don’t do it at all.

George Parker
Another thing, Chris, I imagine you don’t think is a completely good idea is holding the cuts in fuel duty and the freeze costing £5bn a year on top of all the freezes we’ve had over the last, what, 13 years?

Chris Giles
Since 2011 it’s not gone up at all. Net zero is a thing in this country, isn’t it? You know.

George Parker
You think so? Yeah.

Chris Giles
So you would have thought that petrol taxes are something that we should be doing. Maybe the fuel escalator was beginning to bite too hard and we saw protests, but really, freezing it when we’ve had inflation at 10 per cent seems very, very odd.

George Parker
Do you think there’s scope for the prime minister has been more ambitious in his Autumn Statement in terms of starting to introduce personal tax cuts with an election looming?

Chris Giles
Yeah, I absolutely do. And this gets into the weeds of how the fiscal forecasting numbers come about because no one really needs to know this. But come the autumn, you will have an extra year to measure yourself against your fiscal rules because that’s the way that traditionally has been done. Let’s assume nothing goes wrong. So we have exactly the same economic outlook as we’ve got today that will give him £10bn-£20bn extra on his fiscal rule and he will spend it. And we all know this is happening. He could have done it now. He could have kept the investment allowances all the way through the forecast. But really, we are seeing now a lot of gaming of these rules and then the Treasury knowing that they’re gonna get an extra year come the autumn and then they can give away some money. And it’s politically very convenient. It’s all a bit of a mess. I mean, it’s all fun and games, but is it sensible for the way we run our economy? Not really.

George Parker
Torsten, do you think people are gonna feel grateful to this government by the time the next election comes around?

Torsten Bell
I think that the amount of Westminster focus on a pre-election set of personal tax cuts is really overstating how impactful that will be. And if you sit in those groups with workers, then no taxes are going up, we just said by 5 per cent of GDP, right, over the course of the last few years. If you come along and say I’m cutting them by a tiny bit, then people like me and Chris and others will point out that you’re cutting them by, you know, a small fraction of the amount they have gone up in recent years. And the people will feel versions of that in their pockets. I think bringing loads of attention onto what you’ve done on the tax system, I’m not sure it is as big a vote winner as people think, actually, for either main political party. I think that basically the punters know we’re in a tax-raising phase. Is that popular? No, not saying that either. But they know that taxes have gone up a lot at the moment. And I think if your main pre-election offer is a small tax cut, you know, you’ve gotta understand the people who have noticed the big tax rises.

George Parker
And just finally, the public sector pay disputes which have dogged the country in the last six months, looked like they might be starting to come to an end with the deal with the health workers. Was it always inevitable we were gonna end up in this place, Torsten?

Torsten Bell
Yeah, I think we’re more or less ending up in the place we were always gonna get to. The unions said, we want to talk about higher pay in the current year, in ’22, ’23. And the government said, we’re not gonna talk about that at all. We just wanna talk about giving you slightly higher pay next year. And the compromise inevitably is yes, slightly higher pay next year, probably around 5 per cent pay growth next year, and then a one-off payment to pretend that we’ve increased your pay permanently in a way for this year. That’s the compromise, that’s where we’ve been headed at least since December. The reason it’s taken time to get there is because the government wants to let everyone have their chance of having their strikes so that they don’t end up in a position where they’re having to negotiate two different pay years separately and to give some ground on both years. And so instead they’re wrapping them together. It’s painful for people that it’s taken, you know, disruption. It’s painful for workers who haven’t had that pay rise. But I’m afraid it probably was inevitable, at least since the autumn, that this is where we were gonna end up.

George Parker
And the Treasury has said that it can only afford to pay 3.5 per cent. All departments can only afford to pay 3.5 per cent towards these pay settlements, Chris. And they’re insisting that the extra money has to be found from within existing departmental budgets. Do you believe them?

Chris Giles
No. They’ve done this before, frankly, and they will allow departments to pay the money. Departments will run short of money through this coming financial year, ’23-’24, and then they’ll need a top-up later in the year. And then that will be billed as a top-up for something else. But a lot of money will be channeled into pay. That sounds terribly cynical, but I think this is the world we’re actually living in. It’s cynical, but also truthful.

George Parker
It’s a well-trodden path. Chris and Torsten, thanks for joining us.

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George Parker
Probably the most controversial part of the Chancellor’s budget is the scrapping of a £1mn lifetime allowance on tax free pension contributions. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves wasn’t impressed.

Rachel Reeves
The only permanent tax change that the Chancellor announced was to help the top 1 per cent of people save even more into their pensions. But this billion pounds or more giveaway is the wrong priority when ordinary people are facing a cost of living crisis.

George Parker
So let’s have a look at the politics of the Budget. How does it fit in with Rishi Sunak’s election strategy? As the government shot itself in the foot with that £1bn pension tax break for Britain’s richest people. To discuss this, welcome, Stephen Bush, FT commentator and Claer Barrett, our personal finance guru and author of the book What They Don’t Teach You about Money. So, Stephen, what were the politics behind the Budget?

Stephen Bush
So the big picture politics behind the Budget were one, to steal some labour clothing. They’d been flirting with the idea of having childcare as one of their retail offers to use that sort of trade jargon. So he’s very cleverly spiked that. And then the other thing was broadly to go, look, things were very bad when I took over. They’re now a bit better stay the course and you know, who knows, there might be something nice at the end of it if you stick with the Tories. So broadly, this is a staging post budget, you know, trying to blunt some Labour attacks and put them in the best position to fight the election at some point next year.

George Parker
And that’s what it felt like, to me, that basically Jeremy Hunt had four so-called fiscal events between being appointed on the next election. The first one was last November where he tried to stabilise things after the disastrous truss interregnum. This one was about setting up some sort of growth plan and then in the autumn and then the spring of 24, that’s when we’re going to see a bit of a splurge, aren’t we?

Stephen Bush
I think the interesting thing that he didn’t do in this Budget for political reasons, because at time of recording on Thursday, the government has made a pay off from two striking NHS workers, which looking at where they eventually settled in Scotland and Wales would probably be enough to end the dispute. But he’s going to have to use quite a lot of his remaining headroom to deal with that. But this is clearly a budget designed to give him room for that pre-election giveaway, partly because one of the things they want to do is force the Labour Party into a defensive position where they have to reopen all of those questions about tax, tax rises, tax and spend, all those things which have traditionally been a political difficulty for the Labour Party.

George Parker
Now Claer, how are voters going to feel at the next election compared with how they felt when Boris Johnson won the last election back in the dim distant past in 2019, or even when David Cameron won that first Tories term back in 2010.

Claer Barrett
Poorer George is the short answer. And that’s not just the people who are on the lowest incomes, who really have been squeezed the most terribly in the cost of living crisis, but even rising up the income scale, middle earners, even quite affluent people who were reading us in the FT every day but are now struggling to afford mortgage payments and also people who have been crippled by childcare costs. But the big flash point I think of this budget is the way that pensions wealth is being treated. It’s been pushed through the changes that you spoke of to respond to an acute problem, which is that doctors have been forced into early retirement, they say, because if they continue working, then they’ll hit various tax limits in their pension, which could result in tax bills today. Crucially, so what the government has done in just completely scrapping the lifetime allowance. I’m sure there are lots of people listening to this FT podcast who will directly benefit from that yet are not doctors. They may agree with me that it’s the wrong political message to be sending at a time when all kinds of working people are having to cut or even stop contributing into their own pensions altogether. And this is a huge long term sickness within our financial system that none of us are saving enough. In fact, I think many of us will never be able to afford to stop work in any meaningful way. I’ve come up with the term catheters in my FT column before, people who can’t afford to retire, and they are the ones who will be looking at the election ballot next year and thinking, right what do I do? How much is this benefited me?

George Parker
Could the government have devised a scheme which just targets senior doctors and consultants?

Claer Barrett
Well, they’ve had long enough to do it. Now, I’m not pretending to be an actuary, somebody who’s got expertise of, you know, the black box that is the NHS pension scheme. It is a very, very complicated area. But this has been a problem since before the pandemic. But it’s become an acute problem because of the NHS waiting list and the fact that more and more doctors are taking early retirement. But it’s not just affecting people in the medical profession. It’s also starting to affect head teachers, deputy head teachers and civil servants. So the government has had the opportunity to look into this and work out perhaps a more specific solution for doctors in helping everyone. It is helping the wealthy. And the optics of that at a time when the cost of living crisis is raging are not great.

George Parker
Yes. Now Stephen, leaving aside the pensions, just for 2 seconds. A lot of the budget sounded quite laboury, didn’t it? And some of it sounded quite one nationy as well. It was interesting to hear him, Jeremy Hunt, paying tribute to Hezza the godfather of levelling up, for example. Heard him use the words industrial strategy as well.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, this was a pretty moderate, pretty centrist budget in large part. Well, I guess the thing is, is we kind of split this budget into the bit we think is real. Either bit up until 2024 and then the bit at the end of the five year fiscal rule when in order to claim that he’s going to hit it suddenly what would be a very radical reshaping of the state. But I think we all know that that is a not where Jeremy Hunt personal politics are. He is a one nation, fairly moderate conservative politician. But also, crucially, we know if the conservatives were to be re-elected, there is no prospect that they would be able to deliver those very sharp cuts. But, yes, one of the difficulties that this creates for the Labour Party, but one of the opportunities, the pensions decision, I think that’s great for them is that this is essentially a budget. Then Rachel Reeves would not disagree with an awful lot of in the real bit of the forecast, as it were.

George Parker
Yes, and I was speaking to some Labour officials after the Budget and they said, quite a lot of it, was broadly in line with what they were thinking. In fact, the head of the Labour party in terms of developing a childcare strategy because they didn’t actually have any firm policies in that area. But that’s why this was such a political gift, wasn’t it, Stephen? This £1 billion tax break for wealthier people. I mean, that just allows the Labour party to say, same old Tories, doesn’t it?

Stephen Bush
Well, it’s a gift in terms of getting them through the day, right? It allows them to go, as you say, same old Tories, party of the rich. All of those vulnerabilities that the Conservative party has in terms of its brand. But it is a double-edged risk, right? Because the Labour party also has to fight the lingering perception that it’s never seen a tax rises. It didn’t like the one step away from going full Corbynite again. So yes, it helps them today in then it gives them something to say outside the budget and they broadly agree with. And yes, I think it is a bit of an error by Jeremy Hunt, but the politics of opposing are not, I would say, straightforwardly beneficial for the Labour party.

George Parker
And Claer, just on the pensions thing and I guess quite a few FT readers will be interested in this point.

Claer Barrett
Oh yeah.

George Parker
It’s obviously helpful in terms of saving for your pensions if you happen to have quite a lot of money lying around. Does it help you also dodge inheritance tax?

Claer Barrett
Well, any wealth manager worth his or her salt will tell you to spend your pension last because of the way that defined contribution pensions are treated for tax purposes. Now, it does depend on whether you die before or after the age of 75. But if you die before the age of 75, then whatever is in your pension pot can pass tax free pretty much to your heirs and beneficiaries. And even after the age of 75, there are huge tax advantages of leaving pensions because they fall outside of your estate (hmmm) for inheritance tax purposes. So it is an advantage, but it has been capped previously at the level of the lifetime allowance. And now of course, that limit is not just gonna be raised, it’s gonna be abolished altogether. Now, they will need another finance bill to actually do that. And this leaves wealthy people and their financial advisers in a bit of a dilemma because in the one sense, if they are nearing the limit on their pensions now, and even though the statistics show us that only around 10,000 have breached, I would say there would be a multiple of that number who would be coming up to it over the coming decade or so. If they allow that money within their pension to grow and then subsequently Labour government comes in, reinstates the lifetime allowance cap, then they will be faced with a tax bill. Then there are other groups of people who further in the past have had the choice of taking out what’s called fixed protection on a large pension pot, which is a basically a promise — I won’t pay any more into my pension for the rest of my life if I can keep it at this level and avoid the LTA. Will they break that protection, pay and more to the pension and then be penalised in future? I don’t think so. A more interesting situation for people who are still in work and accruing money into their pension pots. It does allow more flexibility raising that annual limit from £40,000 a year to £60,000 a year. Although you know, for some people they’re never gonna pay £60,000 into a pension during the course of their working lives, let alone in a single year. But if you’re somebody who’s playing catch up with pension saving, which I was, because I didn’t start my first pension ‘til I was 30, having a larger limit when you’re earning bigger sums in later life could be a godsend for you. You could be putting in more money in your thirties, in your forties. And also, they said that they were going to raise the level of the pensions taper. Again, I won’t go into the details, but once you start earning more than a quarter of £1,000,000 a year, the amount that you can put into a pension every year does get whittled down. And there are some people, if they didn’t start off doing pension saving early, if they had sudden success and got a huge pay rise, then pension saving was kind of therefore cut off for them. So, they’re the kinds of people who might be able to pay a bit more in. I noted, George, in your story that you quoted sir Steve Webb, (hmmm) the former pensions minister. I mean, he had a fairly nifty strategy. I’m quoting from your story, said, “If I was in this position and thought that the next government might put the limit back in, I’d fill my boots in the next two years, have a bit of a gold rush, and then crystallise my pension on the eve of the general election”. Now I do suspect if they (hmmm) can afford to, many of our readers may be looking to do just that.

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George Parker
Okay well, busy weekend ahead for our wealth managers. And also, if you want to read more about this, read it in the Weekend FT. Plenty more analysis of the Budget. Now, Claer, Stephen, thanks for joining me. And if you’re wondering, Claer Barrett’s book is called What They Don’t Teach You About Money. And we put a link to it in the show notes. And that’s it for this episode of Payne’s Politics. If you like the podcast, we’d recommend subscribing. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. Payne’s Politics was presented by me, George Parker, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Manuela Saragosa. Sound engineer is Breen Turner. Until next time. Thanks for listening.

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