Election latest: Watchdog ‘looking into’ Sunak’s claims about Labour’s tax plans

Rishi Sunak’s claim in last night’s debate that Labour will raise everyone’s taxes by £2,000 comes from a “dossier” published by the Tories last month, which purported to calculate their tax and spending plans. 

The headline “finding” was that over the course of the next four years, Labour had roughly £59bn of spending plans but only £20bn of revenue-raising plans.

That leaves a £39bn hole. Divide that by the number of households in the country (18.4m) and you get a figure of just over £2,000.

Now, there are all sorts of objections to the way the Conservatives have carried out this exercise. 

For one thing, they deployed a weapon Labour don’t have: because they’re the party of government, they were able to ask Treasury civil servants to cost some Labour policies.

Today there has been a backlash – including from the Treasury’s permanent secretary himself – about the way the Tories have portrayed these sums. 

The £2,000 figure isn’t really a Treasury calculation or an “independent” one, as Mr Sunak called it last night. It’s a Conservative figure – but it was put together in part with figures commissioned from civil servants. 

Labour also says many of the policies in that Tory dossier won’t cost half as much as the Conservatives claim. 

Regardless, while £2,000 sounds like a big number, it’s actually a cumulative total from four years. A far more representative figure to take from the dossier is £500 – the annual figure. 

And while that’s not to be sniffed at (if you believe it – which you probably shouldn’t) it’s far, far smaller than the tax rises we’ve all experienced under this Conservative government since 2019.

They amount, all told, to an average of around £3,000 a year per household or, if we grit our teeth and tot it up as the Tories did in their dossier, over £13,000 over the course of the parliament. 

Which rather dwarfs that £2,000 figure.