Mortgage Market

Debate between Andrew Griffith and Tonia Antoniazzi

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

I thank the hon. Member for his question. It must have been quite hard to get through all those points without once mentioning the fact that this has an international dimension. There is a war on European soil in Ukraine, and we have just come through an unprecedented global pandemic. He simply tries to reduce this to whatever is his party’s particular topic of the day. That is not worthy of him when we are trying to have a proper economic debate.

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

The Minister claims to be shielding families. He evidently is not going to say sorry. When everybody in this House is supporting their constituents, we need to know what assessment the Department has made of the number of people actually affected by recent increases in mortgage rates.

[Andrew Griffith]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. Like others, the FCA has talked about the number of people in any one year whose mortgages are repriced. We do not know what the price of those will be. It seems that around 1 million to 1.5 million people are affected, so a significant number, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) mentioned. There are also many savers in society. Rather than looking at what is happening, what we are doing to help is making those difficult decisions. We are not unleashing unfunded, uncosted spending plans on the public purse and we are trying to get through this to help people get to a world where inflation is falling, the cost of living pressures on them are reducing and we can get the economy growing again, which will provide good employment opportunities for her constituents.