Those reliant on state benefits will be worse hit, while poor savings returns and child benefit cuts will hit middle earners – high earners, meanwhile, can celebrate a tax cut

Am I going to be better or worse off? It’s the question most people ask after the chancellor sits down, and this time the answer is simple: you are almost certainly going to be worse off in 2013, unless you earn more than £150,000.

Benefits claimants (apart from pensioners) are worst hit in the chancellor’s bid to cut billions from the welfare bill. While the state pension will rise by 2.5% to £110.15, annual increases to other benefits such as jobseeker’s allowance will be set at 1% for the next three years. While it can be painted as an increase, it is of course a real and permanent fall in incomes for the very poorest in society at a time when the RPI inflation rate is currently 3.2%.

The chancellor argued that since 2007 benefit claimants have enjoyed income gains worth 20% compared to 10% for those in work. But over a longer time period, the picture is very different.

In the early 1970s, unemployment benefit was worth about 20% of average earnings, but today jobseeker’s allowance is a miserable 12% of average pay and will continue to fall as long as the benefits freeze stays in place.

Meanwhile, George Osborne is pressing ahead with the controversial cut in the highest rate of tax from 50% to 45% on earnings above £150,000 a year. So a banker on £250,000 a year will see his or her income tax bill fall in 2013-14 by £5,000. True, he or she will lose out if they have been pouring money into their pension scheme – the new pensions cap is equal to a tax charge of up to £4,500 – but the reality is that financial advisers are already shovelling their clients into other tax-advantaged vehicles such as venture capital trusts to shelter money from HM Revenue & Customs.

Osborne made much of the increases in personal allowances that come through in 2013 and the pledge to take anyone earning less than £10,000 out of the tax net altogether. But for the 1 million people on housing benefit and council tax benefit much of the gain is likely to be tapered away. While middle-income households stand to gain £705 a year from raising the threshold from £6,475 (the level set in 2010-11) to the chancellor’s target of £10,000, low earners receiving housing benefit and council tax benefit will only gain £106.

Middle England may be cheered by the increases in personal allowances – the personal allowance rises to £9,440 from the previously announced £9,205 – yet it is just weeks before the axe falls on child benefit currently paid to 1.2 million families. From January 2013 the benefit will start to be withdrawn from any household where someone is earning more than £50,000, and be completely withdrawn once the income hits £60,000. For a two-child family the cut will add up to £1,752. What’s more, the freeze on child benefit rates lasts to April 2014, and after that it will rise by just 1% a year.

Pensioners may feel they have had a relatively easy ride, with their payments protected, but other measures introduced by the Treasury have cut their incomes.

The Funding for Lending initiative launched this summer has pushed down market interest rates, as intended, to help banks lend to businesses and first-time buyers. But for savers and those reliant on their bank deposits – mostly the elderly – it means the interest they earn on their savings keeps falling.

An impressively robust jobs market – Osborne stressed how 1.2m jobs have been created in the private sector since 2009 – at a time of double dip recession has baffled economists. But make no mistake, even if unemployment is better than expected, living standards in Britain are falling fast.

Just a day before the autumn statement the Office for National Statistics revealed the average family spent £484 a week in 2011, a rise of £10 on the year before. Once you take into account inflation, however, spending was down – and has now fallen by nearly a fifth since the boom days just before the credit crisis.

Indeed, family spending levels are now back to where they were 15 years ago, and more and more of a typical family’s budget is now going on petrol, train fares and heating bills, while spending on things such as clothing, footwear and household goods keeps falling.

Britain’s households are now in their sixth year of spending cuts, and with the things that really matter to household budgets – heating bills, train fares, etc – rising much faster than earnings, there is no end in sight.