A few eyebrows were being raised yesterday as Theresa May claimed again at PMQs that Labour had admitted that their manifesto would have cost £1 trillion to implement. The author of the book which is the source of May’s claim, Philip Cowley, says May’s interpretation is not quite right. We’ve crunched the numbers with some top wonks…

Guido’s bean-counting co-conspirators confirmed that Labour’s 2017 manifesto would indeed have cost £1 trillion over a decade to implement. Forget £350 million a week – that’s £350 million every thirty hours…

Over ten years, the cost would be:

• £486 billion of extra spending
  • Labour’s own costings document put the cost of their spending plans at an extra £48.6 billion a year
• £206.5 billion of additional day-to-day spending not covered by Labour’s costings document, including:
  • £150 billion to build a million homes which previous Labour policy papers estimated would require £15 billion extra borrowing a year
  • £27 billion extra on early years childcare which was undercosted in their manifesto
  • £23 billion on an unfunded mass home insulation progamme
• £304.5 billion of one-off capital spending, including
  • An upfront cost of £176 billion to renationalise the railways, energy supply, water and postal services
  • A £43 billion commitment to extend HS2 up to Scotland
  • A combined cost of £40 billion to build both Crossrail 2 and a Crossrail of the North
  • A £20 billion taxpayer-funded Scottish Investment Bank

All of that adds up to £997 billion over ten years – almost bang on the trillion pound mark. This would amount to a staggering £35,200 of extra borrowing for every household in the UK. More new debt for every household than an average household’s disposable income for a year…