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.’ His colleague Andrew Griffith made a similar argument to Gullis, saying:

I always listen enormously carefully to the very powerful advocacy for Stoke on Trent and the fact that his constituents put their trust in this government. But one of the things that they put their trust in is that this government wouldn’t come forward with the sort of unfunded spending commitments that we see on the benches opposite.

The same arguments cropped up in responses to opposition MPs, including Liberal Democrats who suggested a mortgage protection fund.

McFadden responded to one attack about the Liam Byrne note from 2010 with a dry: ‘Mr Speaker, back to 2023.’

Labour used the mortgage costs issue as its main line of attack, too, with both shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Pat McFadden basing their questions on it. McFadden told the chamber: ‘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?’ Reeves later asked this:

While the government squabbles over parties and peerages, mortgage products are being withdrawn and replaced by mortgages with much higher interest rates. This is a consequence of the Conservative mini-Budget last year and 13 years of economic failure, with inflation higher here than in similar countries. Average mortgage payments will be going up by a crippling £2,900 this year. So where does the Chancellor think that families are going to get the money to pay the Tory mortgage penalty?

Throughout the session, Hunt and his team continually mentioned that interest rates were rising across the world and that the pressures were as a result of covid and the war in Ukraine. Opposition MPs wanted to pin this firmly on the mini-Budget and a failure to fix things properly since then. The frontbench had one defender from the Conservative side: Treasury select committee chair Harriett Baldwin, who argued that the mini-Budget’s impact had been temporary and had faded by now as a result of the work the current iteration of Conservative government had done.

Labour members laughed whenever their party’s own economic record came up. McFadden responded to one attack about the Liam Byrne note from 2010 with a dry: ‘Mr Speaker, back to 2023.’ Politically both parties are finally in the space where trust on the economy isn’t the automatic preserve of the Tories. And the surest sign of that is the number of MPs on their own side who are prepared to raise questions about their party’s ongoing handling of the finances, as they did today.