Neither party is fully trusted on the economy

Jeremy Hunt was bombarded by MPs worried about the ‘mortgage timebomb’ when he took Treasury questions in the Commons today. Everyone on all sides was concerned, and offering their own ideas of what to do and who to blame. One problem for the Chancellor is that ‘everyone’ includes members of his own party, many of whom are pushing him to do something ‘more Conservative’.

The main ‘more Conservative’ policy that Tory backbenchers were promoting was mortgage interest relief. Jake Berry suggested it, arguing that without this kind of support, all the other money spent by the government would be wasted if people lost their homes. Other Conservative backbenchers including Jonathan Gullis made similar suggestions, but Hunt’s response was that ‘those kinds of schemes which involve injecting large amounts of cash into the economy will be inflationary’. The Chancellor added that: ‘So much as we sympathise with the difficulties, and we’ll do everything we can to help people seeing their mortgage costs go up, we won’t do anything that would mean we prolonged inflation.’