Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis has said Rishi Sunak’s spring statement announcements to help tackle the cost of living crisis were “nowhere near enough”.
On Wednesday, the chancellor brought fuel duty down by 5p until next March, raised the national insurance contribution thresholds to remove more low-paid workers from paying it, and took a penny off the basic rate of income tax by 2024.
But the founder of moneysavingexpert.com, speaking to Sky News, made clear there was very little to help with soaring household bills.
Lewis said the national insurance change would have a limited impact on people claiming Universal Credit. and extra cash for a “starving or freezing” fund would only help those in the most extreme circumstances.
Lewis said: “The chancellor has done more than I expected him to do but still nowhere near enough.
“We are still standing on a personal finance precipice in the UK.
“The chancellor is now the only person who can pull us back from that and I don’t think what we saw today is enough to do it.”
Lewis pointed to a “very dangerous time” where typical households will see their energy bills in October go up by £1,300 compared to the same time a year earlier.
“There is nothing close in this budget to covering that amount of money,” he said.
The consumer journalist said the country was reaching the point where people were “heating the human not heating the home”. He explained: “Don’t turn your central heating on, sit in a sleeping back. This is not advice, this is the tangible situation people are putting themselves in. Whether you have to get an electric blanket to get the heat you need, then leave the house to be cold. That is a tactic I am seeing people doing. Stark, isn’t it?”
He added in a message to Sunak: “Chancellor, you are the only person who can help.”