John O'Neill

George Osborne gave us a saver’s budget. Should he have bothered?

‘If you’re a saver, this budget is for you’, George Osborne said on Wednesday as he unveiled measures to let people keep more of what they save – such as combining cash and stocks-and-shares ISAs and whacking the subscription limit up to £15,000 from the 1st of July this year.

But will people put their money away in savings accounts? The OBR’s latest forecasts show that the savings ratio – the percentage of households’ disposable income that they save – will fall by almost a fifth this year, and households will put away significant less than the OBR thought they would last March.

[datawrapper chart=”http://cf.datawrapper.de/JjUGo/1/”]

Households aren’t just not saving – they’re spending what they’ve already saved. In December, Sky New’s Ed Conway reported that households are turning their savings into ready money at the fastest rate ever recorded – £900 for every household over the previous year. This

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