Over the weekend, the Chancellor confirmed plans for HMRC to start collecting tax on savings interest directly from people’s wages via PAYE.

Not income tax or National Insurance, but a new mechanism designed to go beyond the standard deductions from your pay packet and collect other forms of tax directly from your earnings.

The Government says it’s about efficiency. But look closer, and I believe it’s another example of Labour focusing on working people when they want more money.

The Personal Savings Allowance – the amount of interest you can earn tax-free – has been frozen since it was introduced in 2016.

That’s where fiscal drag comes in.

As interest rates have risen, more and more savers have become liable to pay tax on their interest – not because the rules have changed, but because the frozen threshold catches more people each year.

In 2021, around 647,000 people were liable. This year, it’s more than two million. And that number is set to grow sharply in the years ahead.

Labour’s response to this isn’t to review the allowance or be transparent about the increasing liability. Instead, they are now building a system to take the money more quickly and more directly from those in work, placing non-standard taxes alongside your regular income tax and NI deductions.

And while this is happening, Labour’s hard-left backbenchers keep quarrelling over a “wealth tax” the Government has already ruled out as unworkable.

That noise hides what’s happening here in our own towns and villages.

This new payroll mechanism will pull in more people locally each year – first-time buyers saving for a deposit in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, families building up funds for their children’s university costs, and retired residents who have sold or downsized and are carefully managing what they’ve worked for.

For many in our area, these are not vast fortunes – they are savings built up slowly through hard work, often earmarked for essential life goals.

Fiscal drag means those numbers will keep rising in Farnham, Bordon, Haslemere, Liphook and our surrounding communities, not because anyone’s changed their behaviour, but because Labour has chosen to freeze allowances and let higher interest rates do the rest.

It’s a steady siphoning of our area’s savings into the Treasury, faster and with less notice than before.

The Conservative approach is clear: keep taxes low, reward work and savings, and protect the assets people here have built over a lifetime.

Labour’s is equally clear – when they want more, they come back to the same place: the pockets of Britain’s working people, including right here in our community.