Rishi Sunak diverted money from ‘deprived urban areas’ of Britain, says report

A video clip of Sunak speaking to Conservative party members in Tunbridge Wells, Kent was leaked online hours ago.

In the clip, Sunak said: “… 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 Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”

EXCLUSIVE: In a leaked video, Rishi Sunak boasted to Conservative Party members that he was prepared to take public money out of “deprived urban areas” to help wealthy towns.@REWearmouth reports: https://t.co/uZMpjKm6rG pic.twitter.com/07sSzDksMT

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) August 5, 2022

The details of the funding formulas that Sunak, the former finance minister, described were unclear.

As per a report in The Guardian, under Boris Johnson’s Conservative party government, “some of the wealthiest parts of England, including areas represented by government ministers, were allocated 10 times more money per capita than the poorest.”

Sunak is up against Foreign Minister Liz Truss to win the votes of 2 lakh members of the Conservative Party by September 5 to replace Johnson as the next UK Prime Minister. Johnson was forced to resign in July after a series of scandals.

The 42-year-old Sunak is an investment banker-turned-politician who was first elected as a Conservative MP for Richmond, Yorkshire in 2015. His wife Akshata Murty, the heir of Narayan Murthy, the billionaire owner of Infosys, was recently in news following accusations of using her “non-domiciled” status in Britain to avoid British tax on her foreign income.