‘He’s not pulled a rabbit from the hat – he’s a rabbit in the headlights’

Jeremy Hunt’s Budget centrepiece policy of a 2p cut to NI may not be enough to sway unconvinced voters to get on-side at the general election. Pieter Snepvangers reports

When Jeremy Hunt announced his flagship 2p cut to National Insurance contributions in the Budget this week, he hoped the policy would be the turning point in reversing the Conservatives’ ailing election fortunes.

But as one disgruntled Tory voter put it, rather than pulling a rabbit out of the hat, the Chancellor was instead a “rabbit caught in the headlights”.

Christopher Pison, 72, worked as a postman for two decades before retiring two years ago.

He feels the Government has taken his vote and the votes of pensioners for granted one too many times.

“At the last Autumn Statement, and now with this Budget, we’ve been excluded. It’s almost as if they are targeting pensioners by just cutting National Insurance. There was absolutely nothing in it for us.”

Mr Pison, who carried on working three years beyond the state pension age, praised the fact he did not have to make National Insurance contributions in his final years of work, but pointed out other people in his position “gained nothing” from the Budget.

He took further aim at the continued freezing of tax thresholds. The personal allowance, the amount of taxfree income you can earn each year, was frozen for four years by then chancellor Rishi Sunak in 2021. Mr Hunt extended the freeze further in 2022 meaning it won’t rise from £12,570 until 2028-29.

As the state pension increases in line with inflation, it moves ever closer to the personal allowance boundary, meaning hundreds of thousands of pensioners fear they could soon be dragged into paying tax on their state pension income, something Mr Pison described as “disgusting”.

Despite voting Conservative in 2019, he thinks the party is deservedly heading for “wipeout” at the general election. He said: “I’ve never been a fan of Starmer but I thought his response to the Chancellor’s Budget was the most impressive I’ve ever seen him.

“I thought he actually really nailed the reply and when the camera went back on Jeremy Hunt a couple of times, he was sitting there and he looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights,”

However, he added he’s still “leaning towards voting Reform”.

“I think [Nigel] Farage coming back would help in a big way if he came back. They are on 13pc now, if they can get a bit higher, more and more people will think this isn’t a wasted vote.”

Debbie Mant, a 57-year-old accountant from Woking, Surrey, admits she is also considering shifting from the Conservatives if a smaller party stands a chance of taking on the Tories.

The lifelong Conservative voter felt let down by the Government ignoring inheritance tax in the Budget.

“They aren’t really interested in hitting any of these big topic areas,” Ms Mant said.

“Jeremy Hunt was trying to be a crowd pleaser but it was never going to please people.

“It was a whole load of waffle and I wasn’t surprised by that.”

She warned the cut to National Insurance will come with huge costs for businesses. “I’m an accountant by profession and messing about with the National Insurance rate is just a burden for payroll departments. Every time they fiddle around with things like that, it’s just so costly to change.”

Ms Mant instead believes the Government should be bolder and scrap National Insurance, something the Chancellor has hinted could be a centrepiece of the Conservative re-election bid.

She said: “I’ve always thought scrap blooming National Insurance and income tax and just have one tax.

“We, as employees, couldn’t care less which bit is going to the National Health Service or to the police or wherever, you just structure it as one tax, you can call it whatever you like but just one payroll tax and then divide it up however they want too.

“It’s just barmy and all the time they tweak with these little things, it’s just such a costly affair from a company point of view to put all these changes through especially for small companies it must be a complete nightmare.”

If pensioners felt left out, it was a feeling shared by younger voters desperate to get on the property ladder.

While the Treasury said a cut in capital gains tax from 28pc to 24pc on second homes would provide more availability for buyers, 26-year-old Eleanor Towley, said the Budget was “incredibly disappointing” and offered no support.

Ms Towley’s goal is to buy her first home but the teacher, who works at an independent school in Hampton, southwest London, said it could realistically take her until she is 35.

She said: “I pay £1,050 in rent each month and am able to put aside roughly £200 in savings.

“I’ve been saving since I left university and I have about £5,000.

“But my ability to buy a home will depend on lots of different factors. My car was recently down after someone reversed into it and drove off. It means my savings for the past four months are all going to go on repairing that.

“I don’t think tax breaks for secondhome owners to make it more profitable for them to sell a second home is necessarily going to create a boom.

“A lot of people who own second homes are already making lots of money from tenant rents anyway and I don’t know why somebody would be incentivised to sell up that passive income while it is still so profitable.”

The Budget also included an additional £6bn worth of spending on the NHS to improve productivity and cut waiting lists using artificial intelligence.

While £2.5bn will help the NHS meet pressures in the coming year, £3.4bn has been earmarked to “modernise NHS IT systems so they’re as good as the best in the world”. Mr Hunt claimed

‘It’s as if they are targeting OAPs by just cutting NI. There was nothing in it for us’

the package would lead to £35bn in savings and save doctors and nurses 13 million hours a year.

However, Kevin Lewis, a retired NHS director who spent nine years in charge of modernisation and performance at Berkshire Healthcare in the mid-2000s said this rhetoric was “hubris” and rather than focusing on being the best in the world, the Government should first focus on making sure the NHS is “good enough”.

“Anything to do with the public sector, but especially the NHS and IT is always a failure,” he said. “I’m not opposing change but I think the way politicians of all stripes crash about in the NHS system is not helpful.

“In Berkshire, we had something like 32 separate GP practices and almost every single one of which had a different IT system and that is just in one county without the hospitals.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that it is just an incredibly complicated business. I thought

Jeremy Hunt was a good health secretary, he certainly understands health more than any other minister, but I think the [ Budget announcement] was hubris.

“All governments do this, but this particular Tory government is given to claiming being best in whatever and it’s just humbug.

“I don’t think anyone believes it, we just want to be good enough to be perfectly honest and we could be and can be much better.”

‘I’ve been saving since uni. My ability to buy a home will depend on lots of factors’