Seven-party BBC election debate fact-checked

This is false.

Conservative Penny Mordaunt made the claim twice in the debate, repeating it after Labour’s Angela Rayner called it a lie and the BBC’s debate moderator Mishal Husain said it had been criticised by the UK statistics watchdog.

Sir Keir Starmer did not confirm the £2,000 per household figure, which he has called “absolute garbage”.

The figure is misleading, because it is totting up more than £500 a year extra over four years, which is not what you would normally think of if somebody said your taxes were going up by £2,000.

That was the concern from the statistics watchdog.

The Conservatives came up with the figure by adding up how much they claim Labour’s spending commitments would cost overall and dividing this by the number of UK households with at least one person working.

But their costing is based on some dubious assumptions and Labour disputes it.

Like the Conservatives, Labour says it will not raise the rates of income tax, National Insurance or VAT.

On Tuesday, in a head-to-head debate with Rishi Sunak on ITV, the Labour leader said: “We will raise specific taxes, and we have been really clear what they are.”

He mentioned putting VAT on private school fees and ending the non-dom status for wealthy individuals who don’t pay UK tax on overseas assets, as well as tax on oil and gas companies.

“We will raise those but we won’t raise the others,” he said.