Tory mortgage bombshell costing Yorkshire families average £170 a month: Rachel Reeves

The Tory mortgage bombshell is hitting 506,800 families in Yorkshire alone with an average increase of £170 a month. It’s the last thing people need after a year of high inflation and spiking food and energy prices.

But because of the reckless behaviour of this government, it won’t be the last economic hurdle we face.

The reason inflation and interest rates are so high and being passed straight on to working people in Britain is because our economy is so insecure.

It’s not right that a typical British household is now paying over £2,000 more per year for their mortgage than in France and over £1,000 more than in Ireland and Belgium.

We’re so vulnerable to rising interest rates and inflation because there’s been such little effort to protect our economy.

Instead of securing a Brexit deal that works in Britain’s national interest, they’ve botched it. They’ve left us with an arrangement that has added red tape at our ports, made supply chains slower and pushed up prices.

They made the wrong calls on our energy security which has meant our prices have been massively pushed up - slashing gas storage, banning onshore wind and dithering on nuclear power so we have less homegrown energy and pay more to import it.

They’ve created a housing crisis because they didn’t build enough homes, and have introduced planning reforms that will send housebuilding off a cliff.

And that’s all before they got to crashing the economy with the mini-budget, sending borrowing costs spiralling and damaging our reputation on the global stage.

As a result people are worse off, our public services have been pushed to the brink and nothing is working better than it did 13 years ago.

Families in Yorkshire deserve so much better than this.

We’d be helping households across Yorkshire right now with the immediate crisis, bringing in mandatory mortgage support measures. The government’s approach is leaving one million homeowners out in the cold, and doesn’t cover two million buy-to-let mortgages, putting renters at risk.

Our mandatory mortgage support package would cover everyone.

We’d instruct the regulator to require all lenders to allow struggling borrowers to switch to interest-only mortgage payments for a temporary period or to lengthen the term of their mortgage period.

We’d also be bringing in a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants so that the profits of war can be used to ease the pressure on the cost of living.

But if we really want to bring inflation down and tackle the Tory mortgage bombshell - we need to move beyond sticking plaster answers.

We’ve got a plan to take us down a different path. Here’s how it works.

Firstly, everything we do will be built on the rock of economic responsibility.

That’s what Labour’s strong fiscal rules, our Office for Value for Money and our respect for the independence of economic institutions will do.

Then, we will fix the gaps in the government’s botched Brexit deal. We won’t go back to freedom of movement, into the single market or the customs union. But we will cut red tape at ports, and get Britain a food and farming agreement so we can move goods more easily and bring down the cost of food.

At the same time, we’ll accelerate towards becoming a clean energy super power so our energy security is guaranteed, inflation comes down and we can boost British industries. This won’t just help with the crisis we face, it will also create good energy and manufacturing jobs across Yorkshire.

It won’t just help Yorkshire’s economy but help our country lead on the global stage again.

Then we’ll get building.

We know there needs to be more homes and support for first-time buyers and so we’ll help local areas deliver more homes. Crucially, we’ll give first-time buyers and local people “first dibs” ahead of overseas investors, and we’ll bring in Private Renters’ Charter.

Across Leeds, I hear too often how hard it is for young families and working people to get on the property ladder. It completely crushes dreams and holds back hardworking people who deserve to be able to move forward in life.

I know that all of these are not things that you can magically do overnight, but its our long term plan to get inflation and interest rates down.

This kind of thinking is vital if we are to build a stronger, more secure economy - and so we can then move onto grasping the opportunities of the future.

Its what the people of Yorkshire deserve - and its what a Labour government will deliver.