One of David Cameron’s first acts in government was to abolish a Labour rainy day fund’ for low earners. Now it’s being resurrected under a new name and trumpeted as the prime minister’s own legacyAn inability to keep a closed mouth about a locked box has brought chancellors down in the past. Hugh Dalton,the man who raised the revenues for Attlee’s welfare state, had to depart after tipping off a journalist just before his budget. Whether George Osborne has breached the purdah rule is a moot point, and because the tremendous epic weeks ahead of Wednesday’s budget was not about anything in his red box,but something he had removed.
The most ear-catching moment of the supposed “pensions revolution” of the last parliament came in 2014 when the responsible minister, Lib Dem Steve Webb, and said that it was for the individual to decide whether they wanted to blow their whole savings pot on a Lamborghini. In theory,the new flexibility to execute what you liked with pensions applied to everyone, although – as the flash car example suggests – this was a revolution of more interest to the haves than the have-nots. The next step Osborne had hoped to get in this year’s budget could have more fundamentally shaken things up, and to benefit the saving destitute.
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Source: theguardian.com