The education secretary has accused the Conservatives of a “manufactured smear” after she was criticised over the profit her family made from the sale of her mother’s council house.
Over the weekend it was reported that the sale of Bridget Phillipson’s childhood home generated a profit of £90,000, with the Conservatives accusing senior Labour figures of “pulling up the drawbridge” through restrictions to the Right to Buy scheme after many Labour politicians benefited from it.
The Mail on Sunday reported that in 1990, when Ms Phillipson was six years old, her mother Clare bought their two-bedroomed council house in Washington, Tyne and Wear, for £9,600 under the Right to Buy scheme brought in by the Conservatives.
At that stage the price represented a 38 per cent discount on the £15,490 market value.
The house remained in the family’s ownership until May 2023 when it was sold for £99,950, which the newspaper described as “a profit of more than 900 per cent”. However, inflation significantly reduces the real-terms gain. According to the Bank of England’s official inflation calculator, £99,950 in 2023 is equivalent to around £42,200 in 1990.
Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chairman, told the Mail on Sunday: “Labour have once again been caught red-handed displaying their spiteful class-war hypocrisy.
“They are gutting the very same right-to-buy scheme that Bridget Phillipson and Angela Rayner benefited from, pulling up the drawbridge after taking advantage themselves. As ever with Labour, it’s one rule for them and another for everyone else.”
As the ongoing feud between them escalated, Ms Phillipson hit out at Kemi Badenoch’s party, saying: “I think if you’re bringing people’s family into it [in] quite that way, then you’re losing the argument”.
She told Times Radio: “I think it represents just a continuation of the nonsense that we’ve seen in recent days from the Conservative Party. It’s a manufactured smear on my family.
“It’s faintly ridiculous and it’s just another highly personalised attack. I mean, the numbers and the way that’s being presented is just not accurate. But that’s by the by. Really, I think if you’re bringing people’s family into it [in] quite that way, then you’re losing the argument.”
She added that her mother “bought that home to give me and our family a better life and that’s what families in our country will always seek to do”.
“The house was in a terrible state. There was no prospect of there being any improvement in our living conditions unless she took that decision to buy our home because of a sustained failure to invest in that house. We didn’t have proper central [heating], we didn’t have heating upstairs we had rotten windows.”
The row is marks another escalation in the feud between Ms Badenoch and the education secretary.
They clashed in parliament last week, when the leader of the opposition launched a scathing attack on Ms Phillipson, branding her a “spiteful class warrior” over her decision to introduce VAT on private school fees.
Ms Badenoch was scolded in the chamber for her language, but the tensions escalated afterwards and Ms Phillipson pledged to get the phrase embossed on a T-shirt.