Customers in the Cafe 96 Degrees in Leicester were paying scant attention to the budget, being broadcast from a television on the chrome bar, next to piles of brownies and croissants. No-one looked up from their salads (goats cheese and roasted pepper with feta) when the Chancellor reminded them again of his conviction that: “We are all in this together.”

But residents across Leicester will be affected in greater numbers by the welfare reform announcements made yesterday than people in much of the rest of the country. Leicester is fifth highest local authority ranked according to the number of people receiving child and tax credits – with 12% of households receiving them (14,800 households). By contrast, just 2.4% of households in Kensington and Chelsea depend on those benefits.

“The benefits system should not support lifestyles and rents that are not available to the taxpayers who pay for that system,” the chancellor said, before detailing that working age benefits would be frozen for the next four years and that tax credits and housing benefit payments would be limited to two children, so that families choosing to have more children (after April 2017) would not get additional payments.

In the abstract, there was support in central Leicester for the chancellor’s mission to move Britain from a low-wage, high-welfare economy to a higher-wage, lower-welfare economy – but this was combined with consternation about the practical implications of that shift.

Residents here – almost none of whom had watched the chancellor’s speech and had yet to digest the details of the announcements – welcomed the introduction of a national living wage, rising to £9 an hour by 2020.

Standing outside Tim Hogarth pawnbrokers (“Best rates in Leicester guaranteed”), one of three pawnbrokers jammed together in a row on Market Place, forklift truck driver, Jason John, said a rise in the minimum wage would help with his family’s finances. “Sometimes the money goes straight away, on bills, transportation, food. This will mean you’ll have an extra penny to play with.”

Pushing his three-year-old son through the covered market in central Leicester, Nitish Khanane, 33, a chef in an Indian restaurant, said the rise in wages would be very good for his family, but he was unable to calculate whether the freeze to the working and child tax credits his family receives would make them better or worse off in the short-term. He was not planning on having more than two children and supported the decision not to increase welfare payments beyond two children. “Two is enough,” he said.

Working on the exotic fruit stall in the market, Sarah Lunn, 21, who plans to go to university in the autumn said she thought restricting payments to just two children would stop people her age from “popping out one baby after another”. “A lot of the kids I was at school with are on their second child. There’s not much else for them to do,” she said. The increased minimum wage might “encourage them to think ‘Can I do something better with my life?’” she said.