Target Towns: If the budget was designed to win back votes, it fell short in Grimsby and Cleethorpes

Every morning, Mike Burton strides out into the chilly sea at Cleethorpes.

His daily ritual in the murky water at the mouth of the Humber is about doing something positive.

He dunks under while holding his mobile phone above the surface, then he pops up and records his daily message of motivation and positivity.

It’s quickly shared online.

As someone from a troubled upbringing who left school unable to read and write, he knows the value of connecting with people.

Over the past two decades, he has set up a string of special educational needs schools and is now working as a motivational speaker.

As Jeremy Hunt was preparing to deliver the budget, Mike told Sky News: “For me it comes down to one word, hope.

“Hope that things are going to change and that they can get behind something and believe in it.

“I think they need to touch and feel it – and see how it is going to change their life.”

That’s what the chancellor would probably have aimed for but speaking to people in Sky News’ Target Towns of Grimsby and Cleethorpes, it didn’t quite connect like that.

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At the West Marsh community centre in Grimsby where they were laying on a free family drop-in session, plenty of parents were trying to work out if another cut in national insurance would really equate to feeling any better off.

Not really was the consensus.

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Community worker at the centre, Alan Burley, told Sky News: “I don’t think the budget has helped anybody dramatically… it’s an election pitch.

“They (the government) have taken so much away I don’t see how they can ever give money back that will really help because anything they give back is swallowed up… just like that.”

If the budget was designed to win back votes in seats like this one on the Lincolnshire coast, then it fell short.

At the Great Escape’s community cafe on the docks in Grimsby, Chelsea told us she is worn down by so many stories of people struggling in her town.

“You can’t win can you?” she said of the chancellor’s budget.

The 20-year-old works at her family’s garage and while she may benefit from the further cut in national insurance she knows it will disappear without much trace.

“It goes down but next month something else will be up again.”

She’s frustrated at the lack of progress here.

“We are not picking up as a country… we are going back,” she said.

The chancellor is not a magician, as the saying goes there is no magic money tree. There never has been.

People know that but after years of drag on their own budgets, they needed a bit more – votes will be hard to win here.