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Rishi Sunak was on Wednesday accused by Sir Keir Starmer of “resorting to lies” over Labour’s tax plans, in an escalating election dispute that put the UK prime minister at odds with the chief civil servant at the Treasury.
Sunak’s claim that Labour would put up household taxes by £2,000 if it won power on July 4 suffered a serious blow when the figure was undermined by James Bowler, the finance ministry’s permanent secretary.
Bowler poured cold water on Sunak’s assertion, made in a fiery television debate with the Labour leader on Tuesday evening, that the number was based on independent analysis of the main opposition party’s plans by civil servants.
Bowler wrote to Darren Jones, Labour’s shadow Treasury chief secretary, to say the figures Sunak used “include costs beyond those provided by the civil service and published online by HM Treasury”.
He added in the letter dated June 3: “I agree that any costings derived from other sources or produced by other organisations should not be presented as having been produced by the civil service. I have reminded ministers and advisers that this should be the case.”
In a sign of the general election campaign descending into acrimony, Starmer said: “What you saw is the prime minister with his back against the wall desperately lashing out and resorting to lies.”
However, the Conservatives stuck to their claim and challenged Labour to produce its own detailed costings of its plans. “They are panicking because their numbers don’t add up,” said an ally of Sunak.
The prime minister sought to throw Starmer off guard during the ITV debate by repeating a claim — more than 10 times — that a Labour government would put up taxes by £2,000 per household.
The number comes from a calculation that Labour rejected three weeks ago, when Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt claimed Starmer’s spending plans had a £38bn fiscal hole.
Energy secretary Claire Coutinho repeated the claim on Wednesday that this would mean a tax rise of more than £2,000 for every household, although she admitted that was a cumulative total over four years, not an annual figure.
Starmer allowed Sunak to repeat the allegation on numerous occasions in the ITV programme in Manchester before denouncing it as “absolute garbage”; his delay in closing it down made the claim a central feature of the first TV debate of the campaign.
Coutinho told the BBC: “That £2,000 of taxes on working families has been costed by Treasury officials.” She added: “This is something that has been signed off by the permanent secretary of the Treasury as the amount of the proposals the Labour party has put forward so far.”
A spokesperson for Sunak said the Treasury “calculated a large part of the policy costings” while the rest were based on work by the Institute for Government think-tank, adding that the prime minister had not specifically said the Treasury had signed off the £2,000 figure.
The spokesperson said the £38bn figure that underlay the tax calculation was “fair” to Labour and based on the lowest assumptions of what its policies could cost.
But later the Office for Statistics Regulation, an arm of the UK statistics watchdog, said it was scrutinising the £2,000 figure and would release a statement as soon as possible.
In a letter on Tuesday, the OSR urged political party leaders to ensure “the appropriate and transparent use of statistics” during the election campaign, and not to deploy them “in a way that has the potential to mislead”.
Nick Davies at the IfG also questioned Sunak’s use of his research. “As someone whose work is cited as the evidence for around 20 per cent of this black hole, it would be fair to say that I’m extremely sceptical of its accuracy or value,” he said on social media platform X.
He said the Conservatives had used an IfG report to make the assumption that insourcing public services back from the private sector would increase costs by 7.5 per cent.
Davies noted the report had the qualifier “where there is . . . evidence”. He added: “Very often there isn’t evidence!”
Meanwhile, Hunt doubled down on the Tory tax message, promising a “family home tax guarantee” if the party won the election.
The chancellor pledged not to increase the number of council tax bands or carry out a property revaluation, and not to raise the rate or level of stamp duty. Primary residences would continue to be exempt from capital gains tax under the Conservative plans.
Treasury analysis of opposition parties’ policies is a familiar but highly contentious feature of UK political life.
Impartial civil servants are asked to produce costings of policies based on instructions from political advisers.
A snap poll by YouGov immediately after the ITV debate between Sunak and Starmer found people thought the prime minister had won, but by a narrow margin of 51 per cent to 49 per cent.
A separate poll by Savanta published on Wednesday concluded Starmer had won the debate, by a margin of 44 per cent to 39 per cent.
Additional reporting by Delphine Strauss in London
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