My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure: they worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do (using standard HM Treasury costings) then divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). They chose in-work households because it’s a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and cook up a scarier figure. Then, even worse, they quadruple-count. So they took what they thought would be an annual rise and then added them up over four years. Thereby quadrupling the already-fake number and producing £2,000.
But let’s apply a similar method to Sunak’s published plans. We don’t need to guess what the cost of government under the Tories will be: the projected tax haul figures are published by the OBR. It will be £1.02 trillion in the current financial year. That’s with the tax/GDP ratio at 36.5 per cent. Let’s use that as our baseline. The Tories plan to increase taxes to 37.1 per cent of GDP by 2028/29. So the 0.6-point increase works out at £20 billion more tax raised in that year (or around £1,000 per household) than if the tax/GDP ratio had stayed flat.
Add up all four years (as the Tories did for their Labour calculation) and you end up with £320 in year one, £620 in year two, £930 in year three and £1,150 in the final year. So a sum of £3,020 per working household. Except this would be just as misleading as the £2,000 figure that Sunak used so often in the debate last night.
There are serious issues at stake in this general election, and the Tories have just released nonsense figures with fake attribution and given it to newspapers who took it on trust. I’m really not sure that this will help their chances very much.