I’ ve endured THIRTY Budgets! Meet my heroes and villa ins ...

PHILIP Hammond will deliver his third Budget speech next Monday. It’s not one investors should anticipate with any hope.

There was a time when Tory chancellors’ speeches meant we could look forward to tax breaks or savings incentives, but now our best hope is minimal pain.

I’ve sat through around 30 Budgets since joining Money Mail and I’ve drawn up a list of heroes and villains.

Hammond already sits with the latter. He has been no friend of investors, the self- employed or the aspirational.

In 2017 he announced he would slash the tax-free allowance on dividend payments from £5,000 to £2,000 and launched a failed attempt to increase National Insurance for the self-employed.

He has since reneged on a pledge to scrap Class 2 National Insurance payments for the self-employed.

This time the rumour mill suggests he’s looking at cutting higher-rate tax relief given on pension contributions.

The cost of pension tax relief is pushing rapidly towards £40 billion a year. And there is a strong argument that the current system, which is more generous to high earners, is unfair.

However, redistributing existing tax relief is an altogether different thing from snatching a lump of it from the system.

I doubt his fellow MPs will stand for it. An MP’s basic salary is £77,379, meaning they benefit from higher-rate tax relief on contributions to their very generous final salary pension scheme. There’s nothing like self-interest for provoking a sense of outrage.

Down the years some chancellors have pulled rabbits out of their hats. John Major introduced the Tessa in 1990, giving tax-free interest to those willing to commit to five years of saving.

This metamorphosed into the cash Isa under Gordon Brown.

In 1986 Nigel Lawson brought us the personal equity plan or Pep, encouraging tax- free investment into shares.

Chancellor Brown transformed them into stock market Isas and diluted the tax relief.

Lawson also brought a smile to higher-rate taxpayers when he cut the top rate to 40 pc from 60 pc in 1988. Various Chancellors also chiselled away at the basic rate, which stood at 30 pc when I started work in 1982, but is now 20 pc.

When it comes to Budget villains, Hammond has some way to go before he can match Gordon Brown.

His assault on pensions in his first Budget in July 1997, when he removed tax relief from dividends, is still costing us now.

It was sneaky and technical and therefore failed to make headlines at the time beyond the personal finance pages.

However figures released by the Office of Budget responsibility in 2014 showed that up to then it had raised £117.9 billion for the Treasury. I calculated then that with investment growth savers had lost £230 billion from their pensions.

We will never know how many company pension schemes would still be running if he had not done this.

But we do know that everyone with a pension in the stock market will suffer a poorer retirement on his account.

Brown also announced a lower 10p starting rate of income tax in 1999, but failed to apply it to savings interest and had to be persuaded by a Money Mail campaign.

Aside from heroes and villains there are the damp squibs and the squander bugs.

Step forward again Mr Brown with the Child Trust Fund.

The CTF, as you’ll no doubt recall, gave some money to youngsters that they could spend when they turned 18.

The problem is that the Government was borrowing to fund this so those same youngsters will grow up to be saddled with the debt.

Arguably few squibs were damper than George Osborne’s various Help To Buy schemes which never quite worked and the Lifetime Isa. The latter which still exists is meant to be an alternative pension savings vehicle which could also be used as a house deposit.

The clever thing from the chancellor’s point of view was that the tax breaks were given at retirement not when the money was invested — so if enough people took them up the cost of pension tax relief could be sneakily passed on to a future generation.

However Osborne does deserve praise for giving us the freedom to do what we want with our pensions when he abolished the compulsion to buy an annuity, even if this was really an idea from the Liberal Democrats and Department for Work & Pensions.

So who is my ultimate Budget hero? Well that must be David Lloyd George who, in 1909, introduced the people’s Budget with support from Winston Churchill.

It established many of the principles of the welfare state we rely on today and recognised that, in a civilised society, there must be a safety net for the poor and the elderly.