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Hello and welcome to Coffee How Shots, the spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Max Jeffrey and I'm joined by Katie Bulls and Kate Andrews.

So the National Insurance Hike comes into effect today with another 1.25 percentage point

increase. Kate, can you run us through first what this is going to mean for people?

Sure, so it's the new fiscal year. Happy new fiscal year everyone.

Thank you.

Welcome and so the new national insurance levy comes in. Now this levy's had a lot of attention,

not least because the conservatives broke their tax manifesto pledge, not to raise key taxes,

including national insurance. Here we are and we're going to see a 2.5 percentage point increase

on national insurance. Half of that 1.25 percentage points is paid by employers and the other half

will be paid by employees. Now this is supposed to go to social care in the long term in the short

term. It's going to be topping up the NHS to play catch up post-COVID. Here's the difficulty.

In this spring statement a few weeks ago, the chancellor decided to raise the primary threshold

for national insurance to bring it in line with income tax so that if you were earning at

the very bottom end of the pay spectrum, you would be taken out of paying this altogether.

That change doesn't come in for another three months. So actually if you're earning around 10,000

pounds a year, you are still going to be hit by this new levy for several months. This is coming

at a time where the cost of living squeeze is very, very tight. People's bills have gone up in April.

The energy price cap has risen by 54%. Inflation is skyrocketing. You know people are really feeling

...