Robert Paston

subsidising trips to theme parks and free bus travel for kids.

Does this look to you like the best way to protect people on low incomes from a cost of living surge?

This government is only the latest in a long line of governments who talk the talk of wanting to do something about growth and productivity and in the end using a very technical phrase, bugger all.

Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Money with me, Robert Paston.

We have.

And look, I know nobody...

who understands the detail of the interaction between the tax and spending decisions that governments make and the impact that that then has on all of us.

And this is a government that is currently saying that it's big money.

Priority is to help us with the cost of living.

So certainly the initial thing I want to find out from Paul is whether in that hope of helping particularly lower income families with the cost of living is what they're doing remotely sensible and rational.

Paul, great to see you.

I thought we'd just kick off with the government's plans to reduce the cost of living.

It says its number one priority is to protect particularly those on low incomes from the surge in energy prices that are the result of Trump's war in Iran.

And we've had a number of initiatives, one of them

Yet again, not to increase fuel duty, but also there are other initiatives like subsidising trips to theme parks and free bus travel for kids.

I just wondered in the round, does this look to you like the best way to protect people on low incomes from a cost of living surge?

In a word, no.

And as you say, it is the highest earning households that get the biggest benefit, but by some margin.

Why is it that successive governments find it so difficult to target help in a granular way?

Is it a sort of GDPR privacy issue that makes it very difficult to match up these two buckets of data, HMRC's data and energy companies' data?