Right now, his Budget plans are descending into hell. Borrowing costs are rocketing at exactly the wrong time, while his fiscal headroom has shrunk from £24billion to below £10billion. He’s caught between the bond market, which wants him to cut spending, and the Labour Party, which just wants more taxes. Like Reeves, Healey also has to decide which taxes to hike. But he also needs to make it crystal clear which taxes he isn’t going to hike. Otherwise he’ll cause chaos, just like she did.

Experts are urging him to rule out a pension tax raid in his Budget on October 28. Reeves didn’t, and many savers paid a high price for the confusion that followed. Under Reeves, millions feared she would come for the hugely popular 25% tax-free cash, and raced to withdraw it while they still could. Tax-free cash, technically known as the pension commencement lump sum, is one of the biggest attractions of investing in a pension. People love it. And they’re terrified that a money-hungry Labour government will attack it. Just like Reeves stripped unused pension pots of their inheritance tax exemption.

Today, savers can take up to £268,275 tax-free, meaning anyone with a pension worth up to £1,073,100 gets the full 25% benefit. But there have been repeated rumours that the cap could be cut, possibly to as little as £100,000. That would hit anyone with more than £400,000 in a defined contributions pension. That sounds like a lot of money, but it has to last for life. It would buy a 65-year-old an inflation-linked annuity income of just £24,000 a year. Hardly riches.

As speculation swirled before Reeves’s two Budgets, many savers decided not to hang around. They took their tax-free cash to the max. In the year of her first Budget, savers withdrew £18billion, some £10billion more than the year before.

Before her second Budget, the frenzy was even greater, driving tax-free cash withdrawals to £22billion, according to AJ Bell. In total, savers took around £24billion extra due to tax raid concerns. And here’s the thing. Reeves hiked all sorts of taxes, but she didn’t touch pensions tax-free cash.

The problem is, she only ruled out targeting it in the final days before her November 2025 Budget. By then, the damage had been done. Many savers had already taken the money prematurely, and regretted it.

The longer you leave money inside a pension, the better. It benefits from tax-free growth, and when you finally take your lump sum, that 25% is likely to be worth more because the overall pot is bigger.

We’re talking big potential losses that could wreck retirements. AJ Bell calculates that someone who withdrew £100,000 in tax-free cash and put it into an ordinary savings account would be more than £50,000 worse off after 10 years. The losses stack up for those taking bigger sums.

AJ Bell chief executive Michael Summersgill said the figures showed the real-world consequences of allowing pension tax speculation to run unchecked. “This trend is bad for households and bad for the economy. Pulling billions of pounds out of pensions prematurely reduces the capital available for long-term investment.”

He renewed his call for a “pension lock”, a pledge by politicians not to tamper with tax-free cash or equally valuable tax relief on pension contributions. Tens of millions rely on these incentives for a comfortable retirement, yet face uncertainty at every Budget. That has to stop.

John Healey could save everybody an awful lot of trouble by clamping down on tax-free cash speculation now. He has enough on his plate, and surely doesn’t want to be compared with Rachel Reeves too.