Encourage more people to invest

Mr Osborne has been prepared to steadily clamp down on buy-to-let. Just about every related tax break has been pared back and mirrored by steady improvements to the Isa regime.

The stocks and shares Isa and its growing number of siblings are sending a signal that the government would much rather have money invested productively in the markets than in bricks and mortar.

Of course, we have had this before under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson when they invented the Personal Equity Plan (Pep).

We even had – pre-telecoms, media and technology crash – moments from New Labour when it was making some, admittedly quite staggering, boasts about what its new Isa regime and stakeholder pensions could do to boost individual equity investment.

But the Conservative reforms did establish a significant cohort of investors who got the Pep and Isa habit. And although I am yet to meet one of those much-discussed Isa millionaires – or at least one who became rich solely because of it – I am sure they are out there somewhere.

What about the equity-shy millions in middle Britain?

Under this chancellor, there has been a steady opening up of the investment opportunities under the Isa regime, although advisers will point to the steady erosion of pension limits to highlight it’s a mixed report.

But at the same time, there has been, unfortunately, a steady decline in individual stock market holdings – for a whole host of reasons. One has to wonder, however, whether it is going to take more to really establish a decent equity culture embodying long-term investing.

People who have been astute enough to consult advisers, or as direct investors caught the Isa habit, and became fans of investment trusts or unit trusts or exchange-traded funds don’t strike me as having done badly at all out of this behaviour.

But what about the equity-shy millions in middle Britain? There may now be an opportunity for some of that money that was going into buy-to-let to come out of it, or to never get there in the first place.

The second pool of money must be in cash, but in the past it feels as if the industry or the regulations or even the rather hysterical media that always wipes billions off markets but never wipes billions back on, have put them off.

Unfortunately, sometimes when the public have been convinced to invest in stocks and shares, there have been horror stories, such as poor advice from banks, overcharging products from insurance firms, or funds from fund managers designed to be in cash at precisely the wrong time.

We can’t make markets entirely safe and may have to accept that some people will invest on imperfect information.

But the questions should surely be: can we take the huge improvements in standards from the Retail Distribution Review, and now sensibly liberalised a little under the Financial Advice Market Review, to get people to invest more? And, how can we do so without putting them off for life?