The UK Budget last week was well judged in that it committed the necessary resources to provide support to the economy as it recovers from the Covid lockdown and starts the process of raising taxation in the longer run to address the nation’s debt problem.

Companies will pay significantly higher tax. Individuals will pay more tax as their income rises.

For one Budget to have gone further would have been unwise but there are three key challenges which remain to be dealt with and cannot be left unaddressed for much longer.

First, the financial problem is not fixed. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s figures indicate that national debt will continue to rise throughout this Parliament. The politicians have their fingers crossed that growth in the economy will allow debt to fall as a proportion of national income from 2023/24 but that reduction is neither certain nor swift and it leaves the absolute level of debt relative to the size of our economy at a very high level.

This matters because it leaves us vulnerable to an unexpected shock. That shock could be a material rise in interest rates, another pandemic or something we have not yet even considered.

The point is that at current levels of debt we have lost our resilience and we need to get it back in order to cope with the next crisis. Absolute levels of debt need to come down.

Second, we are in the foothills of a profound change in the demographic make-up of the UK.

The proportion of our population who are elderly is starting to rise rapidly and this will within a few years put enormous additional strain on our health and, even more so, our social care services. Without significant extra resources our social care system will collapse as an effective safety net for our citizens.

Third, the unfairness within our society needs to be tackled. Those who have been privileged – the baby-boomer generation, those with final salary pension schemes, people lucky enough to have investment portfolios buoyed up by quantitative easing, homeowners and ratepayers in the south of England – simply must pay more into the collective pot.

We owe it to the young, those on low wages bringing up families, those who can only dream of owning their own home, to rebalance things in their favour.

There are too many dividing lines for a healthy economy and society. Fairness is always so difficult to define but we can feel when we don’t have it. We are going to have to pluck up the courage to address entrenched advantage so that the UK can come back together and believe in itself again.

Scotland leaving the UK makes no sense economically and would harm most those who could afford it least. What feeds the desire for separation is not economics but a feeling of being ignored, disadvantaged, the afterthought of governments who think about south-east England because that is where they are from and understand.

Politicians must lead us in the right direction and we as voters must have the sense to follow them even when it is uncomfortable.

Final salary public sector pension schemes need to stop; those who have built up housing wealth need to pay some of it in tax; unproductive wealth needs to be taxed every year and whenever it is given away but at a much lower rate than 40% ; income tax rates need to be reduced for all except those with the highest incomes; capital gains tax on share portfolios, second homes and private equity carried interests must go up. The machinery of UK Government and location of its decision-making needs to be spread throughout the UK.

Delaying the day when we really tackle these difficult issues cannot go on much longer.

Guy Stenhouse is a Scottish financial sector veteran who wrote formerly as Pinstripe