Dear Robert,

I’m writing to you following the Budget to correct the record on some statistics that were used before and throughout the election campaign.

On the 17th May the Conservative Party presented a dossier entitled ‘Labour’s Tax Rises’ to the public. This was predominantly based on a collection of HM Treasury costings which were undertaken using the formal Opposition Costing process that governments of all stripes have utilised.

Our dossier made the assertion that Labour’s policy commitments led to a black hole of over £10 billion a year by 2028-29 or nearly £38.5 billion over the next four years. This meant that the total burden on an average working household across the 4 years of a typical parliament would be £2,094.

While we were confident in the use of this figure, I note that you wrote to the then-Chairman of the Conservative Party stating that ‘when distilling these claims into a single number, there should be enough context to allow the average person to understand what it means and how significant it is’. At the time, the now-Prime Minister referred to such claims as ‘lying’ and accused us of doing so ‘deliberately’.

I regret to inform you that it now appears the £2,094 per household number is misleading.

In fact, the correct position appears to be significantly higher than this. After the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget on 30 October 2024, it’s clear that the average per-household cost of Labour’s tax plans is in fact £2,237 – and this figure is for each year, rather than across a parliament.

I regret that this mistake occurred and that we – like so many people across the UK – took at face value the Labour Party claims at the election.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew

 

Related links

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Andrew Griffith MP – claims on taxation