The sleepless nights are here again, then. It’s back to the bad old days of poring over a calculator, trying and failing to make the sums add up; back to scrimping and saving, hiding from the bank, wondering dizzily what just hit us.
Even before the Bank of England pushed up interest rates to 5% on Thursday, the Resolution Foundation thinktank was warning that anyone coming off a fixed-rate mortgage next year could expect their repayments to rise on average by £2,900 a year. But that’s just an average: recently I bumped into a friend whose payments trebled when she remortgaged. She and her partner count themselves lucky as they’re earning well enough to absorb the shock, but only by sticking to the absolute bare essentials. No more going out. No more fun stuff.
It’s dismal but maybe not that much of a sob story, until you consider the painful knock-on consequences for jobs and livelihoods of millions of people cutting back like this. All those waiters in restaurants that survived first the banking crash and then the pandemic, once again laying tables in hopes of someone dropping in, only to end up clearing the cutlery away unused at the end of the night. All those small high-street businesses, finally forced to throw in the towel; all those bosses nervously concluding that now isn’t the time to expand. And all those tenants getting emails from their landlords, airily announcing that because their buy-to-let mortgages are going up, so is the rent.
If the long-predicted end of cheap borrowing is now finally nigh – and it certainly looks that way, with inflation stuck at 8.7% and interest rates potentially heading higher still – then for the third time in 15 years we’re once again being plunged into uncertainty, entering a whole new economic era that threatens to leave many of us feeling poorer. It’s a terrifying prospect for those who were poor to start with, obviously, but potentially a radicalising one even for those who had until now felt broadly comfortable.
It’s galling, of course, that a cost of living crisis only really seems to be deemed an emergency once it hits the mortgaged middle classes. When the price of the most basic foods – cheese, milk, sausages – exploded with catastrophic results for families on low incomes, Rishi Sunak responded with not much more than warm words. There was no great backbench mutiny on behalf of tenants whose housing benefit has been frozen since 2020, even as rents exploded. But when trouble comes knocking at owner-occupied doors – well, watch the proverbial hit the fan. Tory MPs are howling for a bailout, even though tax breaks for mortgage holders now would surely risk feeding the inflationary beast, not to mention propping up an overheated property market that is now thoroughly overdue a fall.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt? Tempting as it is for remainers to say we told you so, however, that doesn’t help anyone already at risk of slipping into arrears.
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, is right that a taxpayer-funded bailout for homeowners isn’t the answer, but that doesn’t mean throwing people at risk of repossession to the wolves. Rather, banks must give their customers time to adjust to an unexpected shock, letting them extend the life of their loans or switch temporarily to interest-only deals or take payment holidays if necessary to get them through. Nobody should lose a roof over their head because of a disaster they couldn’t possibly have foreseen. (Sure, interest rates can always go up as well as down; but who was predicting the triple whammy of a pandemic, war in Europe and Liz Truss?)
Vital as they are, small easements such as this are really only ways of once again smoothing a transition to a world that won’t feel like it once did, and to a life where security seems ever further out of reach. This is what it feels like, as a country, to be getting poorer. And this is what it feels like, as a prime minister, to be left carrying the can.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
