The Treasury's Intervention Is Yet Another Blow To Sunak

After Tuesday night’s TV debate, relieved Conservatives claimed Rishi Sunak had detonated another “Labour tax bombshell” with his repeated claim that the party’s £38.5bn of unfunded spending commitments would cost every working household £2,000.

- ANDREW GRICE

But today the bomb has blown up in the Tories’ faces.

In a highly unusual intervention, the Treasury’s most senior civil servant has distanced it from Sunak’s claim the figure was produced by “independent Treasury officials”.

James Bowler told Labour in a letter that the Tories’ dossier on Labour’s alleged black hole “includes costs beyond those provided by the civil service and published online by HM Treasury”, which “should not be presented as having been produced by the civil service”. He has reminded ministers and special advisers of this.

Asking politically neutral Treasury officials to estimate the cost of various policies – sometimes without telling them they are those of the opposition – is an old trick Labour also deployed when it was in power. In his desperation to land a blow on Keir Starmer, Sunak strayed over a line by suggesting the figures were approved by independent officials. Crucially, the policies to be costed were selected by Tory special advisers.

Labour claims there are 11 mistakes in the Tories’ dodgy dossier. For example, it assumes that Labour would install a youth mental health worker in every A&E suite and a mentor in every pupil referral unit. Labour’s policy is a pilot of both approaches.