Her time at the top of the Conservative Party memorably ended just 42 days after becoming prime minister, yet Liz Truss has been a name frequently heard throughout general election debates.
The Labour Party hoped to remind voters of the unfunded tax cuts and spending plans announced in the September 2022 mini-budget which caused government borrowing to soar and necessitated an intervention by monetary regulator the Bank of England to prevent a collapse of pension funds.
The party has bet that associating current-day Tories with Ms Truss and her economic plans will be a vote winner. The party wants voters to think it’s Ms Truss’s mini-budget that sharply brought rates up,
But is it right to attribute more expensive borrowing to Liz Truss? It is and it isn’t.
Can we blame Truss for mortgage bills?
The average new mortgage rate rose significantly in the days, weeks and months following the mini-budget as lenders feared the Bank of England would make borrowing more expensive via elevated interest rates and uncertainty meant banks and building societies pulled
Her unfunded tax cut policies aimed to put more money into pockets when the central bank was trying to take money out of the economy to bring down inflation, which in the month of the mini-budget stood at 10.1% – five times the Bank’s target.
Labour have said monthly mortgage payments increased by £221 in the nearly two years since Ms Truss’s policy announcement, according to their analysis of Office for National Statistics (ONS) data.
How many were likely impacted?
During the period where mortgage lending was most volatile – the two…
