LET’S suppose that the Chancellor is a betting man. It it unlikely, as a flutter on the horses sits uneasily alongside his love for prudence. But let us nonetheless imagine Gordon Brown in his pyjamas, eating his porridge and eyeing up the runners and riders in today’s Grand National. Who will he put his money on? He dismisses Just in Debt. It reminds him that every economist in the country thinks his numbers don’t add up. He is also pleased to hear that Davids Lad is no longer among the starters. Bloody Blunkett, he thinks.

As this is a charming, but unrealistic fantasy, Times Money will pick a horse for him, in the wake of this week’s disastrous launch of his latest initiative to boost savings. Sandler products were designed to be low cost, simple products, which would encourage people to save. But as we report on page 14, only three companies are offering the medium-term investment product, and not a single bank or building society has signed up to offer a Sandler-style deposit account.

In the spirit of the week, we’d suggest £10 on It Takes Time, or an each-way bet on Nil Desperandum.

Perhaps we should forgive the Chancellor a modicum of despair over his savings policy. Stakeholder pensions, which were launched in 2001, have been a flop. Despite predictions about a potential market of five million people without existing retirement schemes, just one million have been sold. Most of these were taken out by those who already had a pension.

We cannot, however, forgive the £5 billion-a-year raid on retirement funds launched in 1997, which has fuelled the pensions crisis and helped to hit the UK stock market. We cannot ignore that under Mr Brown’s chancellorship the proportion of household income put into savings has fallen from 9.9 per cent, when he became Chancellor, to 5.6 per cent — hitting lows of 4.4 per cent.

But let’s return to Mr Brown in his pyjamas. He will doubtless choose Strong Resolve, one of the favourites and a perfectly named nag for the Iron Chancellor. But the Times Money team has decided to have a

punt on the Grand National this year by picking a horse to reflect the Chancellor’s record on savings. It’s a longshot, at about 50-1, but our money’s on Iznogoud.

Debt timebomb looms as students face fee increase

WE CANNOT blame the Chancellor entirely for dwindling savings rates, as tempting as it is to assume that politicians are culpable for all our financial ills. As a nation we are increasingly turned off by the tedium of saving, preferring to borrow and spend instead.

Kate Mayo, our 28-year-old cover girl and money makeover subject, is doing far better than most of her generation. True, she has minimal savings. But she has no debt, and she is willing to budget, cut down on spending and start putting money aside for the future.

The statistics suggest that Kate is relatively unusual in an era that has seen the level of personal debt in the UK pass the £1,000 billion mark. Reaching the age of 28 free from debt is an achievement in itself, and one set to become ever rarer. Fidelity Investments, the fund management group, estimates that students who start university in 2006 will face debts of about £31,000, after the introduction of top-up fees.

The company points out that babies born this year will pay about £49,000 for a university degree. In 2025, most of the people who will have the earning power to save for a pension will be graduates. But they won’t be able to save because they will be mired in a level of debt undreamt of by their predecessors. In 20 years’ time, our concerns about our current preference for borrowing over saving could be seen as hopelessly quaint. We will look back at the early Noughties as halcyon days of savings. OK, so half of the population isn’t saving, but that means half of us are.

There is, of course, the Child Trust Fund (CTF). If you invest the £250 voucher from the Chancellor wisely and gain returns of 7 per cent, your child will have a lump sum of £770 to help to pay the fees. You’ll be glad to know that £770 will pay for two and a half weeks of a three-year degree. But parents can put up to £1,200 a year into the accounts. At an optimistic 9 per cent growth rate, your child will have £49,562 to spend on university fees. To help you to choose where to put the CTF cash, we set out your investment options on pages 10-11. Just pray that your child will be like Kate, and not blow the capital on, say, gambling on the horses.

Gender pay gap has become a retirement income chasm

CARRIE FORD, who is riding in the Grand National, looks set for the start with the shortest odds of any woman jockey to ride in the race. While the bookies are prepared to up the stakes on women jockeys, it seems that employers do not have a similar regard for their female staff.

The MPs on the Trade and Industry Select Committee this week said that the “undervaluing” of women in the workplace was to blame for the fact that the narrowing of the gender pay gap has slowed almost to a halt. Women are paid 18 per cent less than men, 35 years after the Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1970. In the Civil Service the gap widens to 25 per cent.

At retirement, the gender gap becomes a chasm. More than 90 per cent of men receive the full state pension, compared with less than

50 per cent of women. About one-third of women have no private pension provision at all. Fewer than one woman in ten has an employer willing to contribute more than 5 per cent of her earnings into a pension scheme. The halt in the narrowing of the gender pay gap can only serve to perpetuate this inequality.

If you don’t earn it, you can’t save it.