Martin Lewis

And I mean, looking at this from an ordinary voter's perspective, what does this budget mean, if anything, for a typical household? Because on the one hand, you have the £100 to £20 million, I think, households paid for through councils to ease the pain of that big jump in energy bills that's coming in January.

Although Martin Lewis, the money-saving expert who does have the ear of this government, has said they'll have to come back in January with something more because it's going to have Such a big impact.

Removing the standing charge from energy bills, fuel duty freeze, minimum wage rise, and then there's this cutting tariffs on specific items in supermarkets.

But if you balance that against freezing tax thresholds again, so fiscal drag, higher taxes on savings and rental income as well, and the inflation that we've just been talking about, do these little bits of breathing space actually make any difference to an ordinary household?

It's also a budget that is cementing even more intergenerational unfairness, as if there wasn't already enough of that going around.

Here's money-saving expert Martin Lewis on the biggest thing he asked the Chancellor to fix.

The thing I'm most disappointed about in the budget is the thing that was top of my list when I met the Chancellor, and that is I wanted him to reverse Rachel Reeves' freeze on the Plan 2 student loan threshold.

I think it is a moral wrong.

It should be treated as morally outrageous, not just because it retroactively changes agreements between graduates and the government, but also because it's an additional 9% marginal tax rate on one generation that previous ones who went to university for free will never pay.

Treasury Minister James Murray, who went to university when tuition fees were only £1,000 a year, didn't seem that concerned about it, though, when he was speaking to Newsnight.

Martin Lewis has called it today a breach of natural justice to change the contractual terms on loans that 18-year-olds signed up to.

That's

But just as a means of getting a bit of extra cash into people's pockets.

I mean, the money saving expert Martin Lewis says using council tax bands A to D is the least worst way to do it.

I mean, is he right? What does the value of your house tell you about your ability to pay your energy bills?

There's several questions there.

So I just frankly turned the TV off.

And what do we make of the criticism that this is a kind of Martin Lewis government? A lot of people have compared Andy Burnham and John Healey to the sort of the money saving expert, scrimping and saving here and there, but, you know, not tinkering with any of the real, not actually getting to grips with any real underlying issues.

I think there's a real shrinking of politics and what is supposedly possible, certainly under this government, but you can argue under previous governments as well.

We're basically being told that if we take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves.

of emerge.

Well, um, Martin Lewis has apparently, uh, Martin Lewis, the, the one on consumer champion is, but has apparently been campaigning for this for some time.

And I read something from him yesterday and sort of one of the aspects that he thinks could work is some kind of bonus on, on contributions.

I think he mentioned 5%, um, and whether that would be, I mean, I assume that would be then paid for by or funded by the government.

That's what the Chancellor set out in his budget today.

Martin Lewis has called it today a breach of natural justice to change the contractual terms on loans that 18-year-olds signed up to.

That's fair, isn't it? Well, I know

Martin has views on that.

This is one of them.

And the opposite is being done, which is let's hide under some coats until it all goes away.

And the problem is it's not all going to go away because people in their late 20s and early 30s, crucially in the media, and Martin Lewis... means that it just isn't going to go away.

There's a reason why Newsnight, in its new format, its new podcast format, has been banging on about it for months, which is trying to get a moderately younger audience.

So, as you say, it's a 4% increase coming in from next April.

One of the reasons is to try and make their tax system fairer that this won't affect people with a lower rate of savings and in fact what we've done in the budget today that you've seen is to reverse the plan to reduce the cash ISA limit so the cash iso limit will stay at twenty thousand pounds we're also working with martin lewis who was in downing street this morning very early doors you might have seen who was talking about our plan for next year for taking standing charges off gas which will help young people and others across the economy but he has been a very keen advocate of a starter ISA to ensure that if people do have a little bit of money they can put on the side for savings, that we encourage them to invest in stocks and shares where there's a much better rate of return than cash.

So we are working with him to look at whether we...

Well, we'll definitely consult and see whether we could set up a new ISA to do that.

But the market, and we were just talking about this off air, the market expects the next roof to be up, which is why the average two-year fix is nearly 6%, the highest in three years.

The OBR expects rates to be higher for longer as people roll off the cheap rates, but there's also, we were talking about the Martin Lewis thing where capital economics think that they don't think it's going to be as high for so long.

So there is a possibility that, you know, Q2, Q1, Q2 next year, it could be, uh, you know, we're not, we're not going to be talking about 0.1 interest rates.

Don't think you're going to be 2% interest rates again, but it's definitely is going to go up.