Can you remember the main measures announced in April’s Budget? Full marks if you can but don’t worry if you cannot. Most changes to the tax system are easily, and often best, forgotten.

It was Gordon Brown’s last Budget speech as Chancellor and he ended it with an act of great political theatre. In his final breath, he stunned the House of Commons and wrong-footed the Tories by announcing what seemed like a generous 2p cut in the basic rate of income tax for the following year.

What soon became clear, however, was that this was not a tax cut at all but merely a rejigging of the tax system. The simultaneous abolition of the 10 per cent rate and the increase in the threshold for National Insurance Contributions cancelled most of the benefit.

The Treasury has just published the allowances, tax credit and benefit rates for 2008 so the impact of these changes on individual taxpayers is only now becoming clear. As we report on page 12, it is a rather unlikely list of winners and losers.

Single people on low incomes will see their take-home pay fall, while single people with salaries of more than £60,000 will be hundreds of pounds a year better off.

There are other anomalies. A family with both parents working and a combined income of just £30,000 will be only £57 a year better off, while a family with both parents working and a combined income of £60,000 will benefit to the tune of £657 a year.

The Government has defended the changes on the ground that they are a simplification of the tax system. But this is disingenuous. The abolition of the 10 per cent band would have made many hundreds of thousands of low-income households worse off had it not been for increases to the child and working tax credits.

But changes to tax rates that make families more dependent on the complicated and discredited tax credit system cannot reasonably be described as a simplification.

The next time Mr Brown wants to simplify taxes he should just raise the personal allowance, which has increased by only half the rate of earnings since Labour came to power.

It’s never too late to learn a lesson in financial literacy

It is a national shame that so many young people leave education without being able to read or write properly. But schools are not letting pupils down in just the three Rs. Most teenagers also leave education without a worthwhile standard of financial literacy, leaving them open to exploitation by a merciless financial services industry.

The Government at least acknowledges the problem and has promised to find more room in the curriculum for lessons in personal finance (although ministers have yet to make the subject compulsory). But even if this succeeds in helping the younger generation, it is no good for the millions of people of working age who already lack the confidence to make the most basic of financial decisions. Help may now be at hand.

Otto Thoresen, the chief executive of Aegon UK, this week published the interim findings of his Treasury-sponsored review into financial capability. He suggests that a national service should be established to offer basic financial advice free to anyone who wants it. He says that it could be offered over the phone and online, and should build on existing schemes run by organisations such as Citizens Advice. The service would focus on managing debts and budgeting, savings and mortgages, and planning for retirement. The benefit of introducing the system would outweigh the cost by a scale of more than three to one, according to Mr Thoresen.

The review’s thoughtful proposals are a welcome development. The lack of useful and truly independent advice for those at the lower end of the income scale is a clear market failure. The Government has done nothing about this problem for too long. When the review submits its final proposals early next year, ministers must accept its recommendations and take action. It would be a scandal to shelve the report.

The costs can be shared with the financial services industry and the inevitable howls of protest should be ignored. Too many companies have profited from their customers’ lack of financial know-how for too long.

And now for the good news: common-sense rulings on tax

You wait for ages and then two come along at once. Not buses, something far rarer – two pieces of good news on tax.

First, the Government decides to abandon its deeply unpopular plans to introduce a pay-as-you-throw bin tax. Then a landmark ruling in the Court of Appeal allows businesses and individuals to sue the taxman for bad advice, delay or incompetence.

Both developments are a rare victory for common sense. It is clearly unfair to introduce an expensive pay-as-you-throw disposal service when households are already paying for refuse collection in their council tax. Inevitably, the new service would also have led to an increase in fly-tipping and no end of local disputes by creating an incentive for dishonest neighbours to dump their rubbish in one another’s bins.

It is also sensible to make Revenue & Customs, an organisation that recently spent £500,000 mistakenly chasing a £7,000 tax bill, accountable for its mistakes. What better way to encourage good practice than to punish bad?