The chancellor has claimed that earning £100,000 a year is “not a huge salary”.
Jeremy Hunt made the remark on social media platform X, in a post which was aimed at his constituents in Surrey.
He will be campaigning hard as he is changing seats for the next general election after the boundaries were redrawn as part of a regular review.
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In the post on his profile, Mr Hunt said: “I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government’s childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k.
“That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay.”
Mr Hunt increased the threshold for childcare benefits in his most recent budget.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the average salary for someone in full-time work was £34,963 in April 2023.
Mr Hunt is standing for the Godalming and Ash constituency, having represented the Farnham and Haslemere constituency.
According to Rightmove, the property marketplace website, the average price of a house in Godalming has been £683,463 in the past year.
Paul Follows, a Liberal Democrat councillor who is standing against Mr Hunt in Godalming and Ash, said: “Perhaps this is the case when you are a multi-millionaire who can funnel 100k+ into his own campaign without breaking a sweat – but it’s great deal more than the national or local average and a massive indicator as to why the cost of living crisis impacting residents across the country seems to have missed him totally.”
It was recently announced by the independent body IPSA that MPs would get a salary rise from £86,584 to £91,346 for the next financial year.
As a senior cabinet minister, Mr Hunt takes an extra ministerial salary of around £67,000 – meaning his earnings from politics are around £150,000.
He is also independently wealthy from his previous business career, and was previously dubbed the richest member of Theresa May’s cabinet in 2017, having earned £14m from the sale of a stake in an education business he ran.
Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s shadow paymaster general, said: “The chancellor has again revealed how desperately out of touch the Tories are with working people when he claims someone earning £100,000 a year is not a ‘huge salary’.
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“The overwhelming majority of working people in this country would dream of earning that, yet they are all made to being made to pay the price of fourteen years of Tory failure.
“It is staggering for the chancellor to complain about mortgage costs when it was the Conservative government which crashed the economy with their kamikaze budget and sent mortgage costs through the roof.
“Only a Labour government will stand up for working people and tackle the cost of living crisis.”
