Jeremy Hunt's Autumn Statement this week was "a lot of talk and not a lot of walk" according to guests on the latest edition of the FTAdviser Podcast.
The Autumn Statement included a cut in the main rate of employee Class 1 national insurance contributions from 12 per cent to 10 per cent from January 6.
For the self-employed, the main rate of Class 4 NICs reduces from 9 per cent to 8 per cent, and Class 2 NICs will be abolished, both from April 6.
But guests on the FTAdviser Podcast said this was unlikely to have any meaningful impact on finances and was better seen as a starting gun in an election campaign.
Claire Trott, director at Technical Connection, said: "We should always welcome a cut. For me this was the easy option. Doing something with income tax is much harder.
"I would have expected there to be something more for employers as well, especially as we have seen an increase in the national minimum wage.
"I think this is positioning for an election [...] but we will always take a tax cut."
Matthew Todd, associate director at RSM, said Hunt may have chosen to cut national insurance because it chimed with his rhetoric about helping workers while a cut to income tax would also have benefitted those who received passive income through streams such as rent.
But he said the Autumn Statement was ultimately "a lot of talk and not a lot of walk".
Todd said: "It is a tinkering of rates rather than anything else - although Class 2 NICs getting abolished is a slightly different matter, but not a significant amount really to most self-employed businesses.
"The national insurance saving arises on the basic rate band [...] so individuals that are earning more than £50,270 are paying the same rate of tax.
"It is presumably going to be frozen tax bands and allowances as was forecast. If you're employed the only option is to look at your pension [where you can get] significant tax relief and hopefully you are saving for retirement, but then the accessible age for private pensions is going up to 57 so that might not be desirable for some people.
"If you put money into Isas that could be good for savings and you can now shop around for the best rates and switch between Isas but the Isa allowance hasn't gone up for a number of years now and there was no announcement about when that's going to go up.
"There's not a for individuals to be doing here."
Ian Cook, a chartered financial planner at Quilter Cheviot, pointed out that fiscal drag and the lack of changes to any of tax thresholds in recent years was the thing which had been "hurting people" recently rather than the tax rates themselves.