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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 row 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 Starmer 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 used by Sunak “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 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.
Sunak 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 debate 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 that the Treasury had signed off the £2,000 figure.
The spokesperson added that 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 Institute for Government 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 that the report had the qualifier “where there is . . . evidence”. He added: “Very often there isn’t evidence!”
Treasury analysis of opposition policies is a familiar but highly contentious feature of political life. Impartial civil servants are asked to produce costings of policies based on instructions from political advisers.
Lord Nick Macpherson, former Treasury permanent secretary, said last year: “Costing opposition policies is the most depressing task to befall Treasury officials. Since political advisers determine the assumptions, garbage in leads to garbage out.”
A snap poll by YouGov immediately after the debate gave Sunak a narrow 51/49 point lead over Starmer when viewers were asked who they thought had won.
But a separate poll by Savanta published on Wednesday found that 44 per cent of people thought Starmer had won the debate, compared with 39 per cent who thought Sunak was the victor.
Additional reporting by Delphine Strauss in London