For the vast majority of people across the United Kingdom, this year’s Budget may as well not have happened.

After working through the Chancellor’s announcements and examining the practical impact on household finances, it is striking how little has changed for ordinary working people. For many families, the only noticeable measures are a £100 payment for households in Council Tax bands A to D and the abolition of gas standing charges.

Neither measure addresses the deeper challenges facing normal people.

The £100 payment is welcome as far as it goes, but it barely touches the sides of the ongoing cost-of-living pressures that households face. Energy bills, housing costs, food prices and transport expenses remain significantly higher than they were only a few years ago. A one-off payment offers temporary relief but does nothing to improve long-term living standards.

Meanwhile, the abolition of gas standing charges has been presented as a significant intervention. Yet this measure deserves closer scrutiny. Standing charges exist to recover fixed costs within the energy system. Removing them does not make those costs disappear. Instead, the cost is likely to be recovered elsewhere, most probably through higher unit charges. For a vast majority of households, this is less a case of eliminating costs and more a case of shifting how those costs are paid.

The real disappointment is that the Budget represents a missed opportunity to address the growing burden on working-age taxpayers and younger generations.

If the government was serious about making Britain fairer, it should have focused on reducing the tax burden on earned income. Three changes in particular would have provided meaningful support to millions of workers.

First, the personal allowance should have been increased. Years of fiscal drag have seen more and more people pulled into paying tax even when their real purchasing power has barely improved, in many cases it has retreated slowly. Raising the personal allowance would have allowed low- and middle-income earners to keep more of what they earn and would have provided support across the income spectrum.

Second, the threshold at which the higher rate of income tax becomes payable should have been increased, at least regionally. In London a normal classroom teacher with 5 years of experience is paid above the threshold for higher rate tax. This increasingly pervasive fiscal drag is meaning that working people are increasingly being dragged into higher tax bands never designed for them.

Third, the government should have increased the earnings threshold at which student loan repayments begin. Similarly to tax thresholds, graduates are increasingly being dragged into paying ever larger amounts of a relatively modest income in student loan payments. This money would be disproportionately spent better by young graduates than by the government.

Graduates already face a substantial effective tax rate through the student loan system. Many younger workers find themselves paying income tax, National Insurance and student loan deductions before they have even begun to build savings or get onto the housing ladder.

All of these compound together alongside the frankly irresponsible increasing of housing demand by the government’s new housing ISA to create a fiscally intolerable situation for the engine room of our national economy.

For millions of young and working people, the people who drive the UK economy, this Budget was one of managed decline rather than ambition. Labour must do better.

* Callum Robertson is a teacher and member of the Federal Board. He is a Watford Borough Councillor.