The Conservatives are betraying homeowners in Esher and Walton.

The Government’s dangerous mini-budget and their mishandling of the basics of sound economic policy is having a very real and immediate impact on hard-working people in our community.

Seventeen thousand households in Esher and Walton have a mortgage - that’s almost 40% of homes. That’s higher than the UK as a whole which is 33%. (Source: Commons Library)

In just two weeks - since the mini-budget - average mortgage rates for a two-year fixed deal have risen from 4.75% to 5.97%. In practice, for someone on a 30-year mortgage borrowing £200,000, that would mean a monthly repayment of £1,179 rather than £1,026. Multiply that by the likely average levels of mortgages in an area such as Esher and Walton (where house prices are twice as high as the national average) and you can start to see the abyss into which many households are likely to fall.

And this is only the beginning. Predicted interest rates will continue to rise - up to 4.4% in June 2023 - and haven’t even begun to feed through to the mortgage market yet.

Judging by her bemused response to Sky’s Beth Rigby, when she enquired whether the Prime Minister herself had a mortgage, Liz Truss has no idea what this hike means in practice and what the soaring interest rates are going to mean for each and every one of those 17,000 households in Esher and Walton.

Unlike memories of the 1970s power cuts, memories of 15% interest rates in the early 1990s are by no means a reliable comparison with what lies ahead. If interest rates rise as high as 6% in the next year, that is the same in terms of affordability, as Sky’s Ed Conway has detailed starkly, as the 12.7% average rates we experienced in the late 1980s. The affordability of mortgages is determined by the amount of disposable income that goes towards paying them off - again, given that the average price of a home in Esher and Walton is already twice as unaffordable as the average in the rest of the country, it’s going to hurt. Add to that UK house prices have increased by over 1,000% since 1980 which means debt is much higher while real wages have stagnated for over a decade means it’s going to hurt a lot.

The Conservative Government is once again failing hard-working families. The public think so too. A majority of people believe the Government is to blame for the rise in fixed-rate mortgages. (Voters blame ministers for spiralling mortgages | News | The Times )

Liz Truss is betraying homeowners as struggling families are left to pick up the tab for this Government’s incompetence. The Conservatives have added hundreds if not thousands of pounds to our bills through a shambolic, ideologically driven budget at the height of a cost of living crisis. It’s time we got rid of this incompetent and now dangerous Government once and for all.