The chancellor’s budget on Wednesday has provoked criticism from think tanks and opposition politicians. The Resolution Foundation said that the UK’s weak growth and rising debt interest costs mean that Britons are “paying more tax but seeing public services cut”. Analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that government plans to encourage people back to work will only bring back "a fraction" of the those who left work over the past two years and cost £70,000 a job. Critics are also pointing out that scrapping of the lifetime allowance on pensions will cost the Treasury £75,000 per person in tax breaks for some of the country’s wealthiest savers and is likely to add only 15,000 more workers to the workforce by 2027/28. Labour party leader Keir Starmer called the policy a “a huge giveaway to some of the very wealthiest” and promptly pledged to reverse it.