Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were both present for Prime Minister’s Questions, but the session was largely Why You Should Vote For This Party In The Local Elections Tomorrow. Backbenchers on both sides used the half hour to air their grievances with local councils led by their rivals, or praise the important work of authorities where their own party had power. Both party leaders framed their exchanges around their own local messaging, too, but what was interesting was that Starmer chose to lead on home ownership and housebuilding.
The Labour leader used housing as the latest example of things Sunak likes to pretend are going absolutely fine even when they manifestly aren’t. He has been making this case at PMQs for the past few weeks, always driving the point home by pointing to some aspect of Sunak’s own wealthy lifestyle which shows the Prime Minister hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. Today he also decided to remind people of the Liz Truss era and the impact that has had on people’s own finances.
Starmer opened by asking how many homeowners were paying higher mortgages as a result of Truss’s mini-Budget. Sunak, who is mulling bringing back Help to Buy, replied that the government had cut costs for first-time buyers and had seen the ‘largest number of people buying their first home’, which wasn’t what he’d been asked about. Starmer pointed this out, offering the figure of 850,000 people paying higher rates because Truss ‘used their money as a casino’ and ‘created a self-inflicted financial crisis’. Sunak then accused Labour of wanting to push up debt, Starmer carried on with his focus on higher mortgages with a warning that 935,000 people would be paying higher mortgages by the end of this year and that the cost of a deposit was rising by £9,000. The pair continued to swap arguments about whether the Tories were doing enough.
The most depressing line was from Sunak accusing Starmer of wanting to ‘impose top-down housing targets, he wants to concrete over the green belt and ride roughshod over local communities’ and that he had U-turned on his previous policies. It was a retort to the Labour leader saying the Tories were failing to build enough homes or help people onto the housing ladder, but it was also clearly something he felt would appeal to Conservative voters, whose worries about building enough homes have thwarted the attempts of the government to reform the planning system and increase supply over the past 13 years. The best line came from Starmer, who told the Commons that the Tories were ‘going to need a bigger note’. It was a memorable reference to the Liam Byrne ‘no money’ note that the Conservatives are still waving around more than a decade on, and part of a wider attempt by Labour to acknowledge that note and turn it back on the Tories. Given Starmer has now settled into a pattern at Prime Minister’s Questions, we should expect the note to come back long after the fallout from tomorrow’s local elections have faded.
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