The Chancellor is expected to announce in today’s Budget that the much-maligned Money Advice Service is to be abolished. Mark Soper reports on its short but checkered history.

A true ‘White Elephant’ with a total cost of around £250m to date and despite a quarter of this being spent on marketing, a recent review by Christine Farnish, former head of the National Association of Pension Funds found that very few members of the general public had even heard of it.

Launched in 2010, it did not take long for serious concerns about the service to be flagged up and during a select committee hearing in 2012 financial advice pundit, Martin Lewis, called the service ‘’embarrassing’’ and its product ‘’crap”.

With the advent of pension freedoms, Pensionwise was born and although charged with focused guidance for investors taking their retirement benefits rather than the delivery of overall financial guidance that was the domain of the MAS, the guidance area had become muddied.

Instead of ‘’Asking Ma’’ the Treasury asked Martin Lewis who was again drafted in last year to try and improve matters and in January this year, MAS reported that between April and December 2015 there had been a record 12 million website hits resulting in around 11 million financial transactions. Despite this news, George Osborne is clearly unimpressed and the service will now be gradually wound up and replaced by a more streamlined service.

For Martin Lewis, well, we do not expect he will need to dust off his CV anytime soon.