Pat McFadden
Main Page: Pat McFadden (Labour - Wolverhampton South East)Department Debates - View all Pat McFadden's debates with the HM Treasury
(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
The only thing that grew as a result of what the Government did last September was people’s mortgage payments. Two-year fixed rates are now more than 6%, and payments for householders are up £2,900 over the next year. Have the Government learned the lesson from the previous Prime Minister’s decision—I stress that word; it is nothing to do with international events—to use the country as a giant economic experiment that hurt homeowners, pushed up interest rates and shook international confidence in the United Kingdom? If they have, will the Minister now apologise to the householders who are paying the price for that mistake?
Andrew Griffith
As ever, I listened carefully to the right hon. Gentleman’s rhetoric. I ask him whether he has learned the lesson from what we saw with the last Labour Government, who spent their way through the nation’s finances and whose most lasting contribution to the economy was a note that we inherited from the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury saying there was no money left.
Mr McFadden
Back to 2023. This is a real crisis, affecting real people as a result of the real decisions of the Minister’s Government. Figures out today show that the average UK tenant is spending more than 28% of their income on rent, and rents have gone up by more than 10% in the past year. Rents are being forced up because the landlords who people rent from are seeing their mortgages go up, too, and sometimes even faster than mortgages in general. The Chancellor and the Prime Minister were supposed to be the team that would come in and sort everything out. Can the Minister tell us what went wrong?