Steve Reed the Environment Secretary has said that Conservative Party “covered up” the true extent of their spending pressures.
Reed said that Labour “knew the inheritance was going to be bad,” but now they have “seen what’s really been going on.”
Today the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to inform the public there is a £19 billion hole in the country’s finances.
Reed told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, “We knew the inheritance was going to be bad and that was being flagged up through the election. But we’ve got into our offices now, we’ve seen what’s really been going on and it’s catastrophic.
“But there were things that we could not have known during the election because the Conservatives had not only not released the information, but in some cases they deliberately covered it up.”
Reed said that Rishi Sunak was previously warned there will be a “critical failure” within the prison system.
He added, “We now know his own justice secretary was telling him to take the measures… He refused. He called the general election. He covered up that information until after the general election.
“We could not have known until we won the election what was going on with the prisons and that’s not the only case of the Conservatives knowing a problem and hiding it.”
He made reference to the Home Secretary’s statement to MPs that £700 has been spent on the failed Rwanda Scheme.
Reed said, “My question to Conservative MPs on that one is, did you know and were you involved in this cover up? Or did you not know?
“In which case, they should be grateful that Rachel Reeves is now exposing the true extent of this catastrophic inheritance from the previous Conservative government.”
Alicia Kearns, the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs told the BBC, “It is frankly, nonsense to say they don’t know how the sums add up. They’ve had the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) , they’ve had the detail.”
She added: “We also were very clear there are difficult spending decisions to be made. Labour lied and said, ‘we’re not going to put tax on working people’. They wouldn’t define what that was.”
Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that the Government was aware of the poor financial situation. He told Sky News on Friday: “At the highest broad level, yes of course they knew broadly speaking how bad things were.
“I’ve no doubt they’ve discovered some specific issues and particularly about how tough things are this year or immediately, which wouldn’t have been quite so evident from the public pronouncements. So my guess is that that’s what they’re going to focus on on Monday.”
