'We inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone.'
Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been boasting about taking money away from ‘deprived urban areas’ and handing it over to wealthy towns, as video footage emerged of him speaking to Tories in Tunbridge Wells.
The video, obtained by the New Statesman shows Sunak saying: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this are getting the funding that they deserve because we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone.
“I started the work of undoing that”.
The footage, which basically shows Sunak admitting that Labour were levelling up, while the Tories are levelling down, drew criticism on social media.
Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Lisa Nandy said that the revelations were scandalous. She tweeted:
“It’s scandalous that Rishi Sunak funnelled public money away from deprived areas and gave it to affluent Tory shires.
“The Levelling Up Secretary needs to urgently investigate what changes were made to funding formulas and what justified the changes.”
Nandy has also written to levelling Up Secretary and Tunbridge Wells MP Greg Clark about Sunak’s “deeply concerning” claim funding was moved away from “deprived urban areas” to favour others, asking him to urgently investigate the changes to funding formulas.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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