THERE’S something “fishy” about Rishi Sunak’s flagship £1 billion town funding plan, Labour leader Keir Starmer has said.

Of the 45 areas allocated cash as part of the deals, 40 are represented by Tories. There are also questions over the separate Levelling Up Fund which is UK-wide.

The constituencies of four Tory ministers are in level 1, the top tier for funding, including Alister Jack’s Dumfries and Galloway.

Starmer told reporters yesterday: “If we look at the towns fund there are 45 areas and 40 of those areas are where there is a Conservative MP.

“I think lots of people would scratch their heads and say ‘what is going on here?’

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“This should be going where it is really needed and the Government needs to publish the criteria for this because 40 of the 45 going to Conservative areas, this feels like pork-barrel politics.”

Starmer added: “We have no issue with areas getting funding, of course we need funding across the whole of the UK.

“We have had a decade where the economy has been stalling, there needs to be investment, we all want to see that funding going in.

“But it has got to go in properly, to the areas that most need it, and it has got to go in in a transparent way.

“If you end up with a list of 45 areas where the funding is going in and, by coincidence, 40 of them are where there is a Conservative MP, most people would say ‘what’s going on here, this looks fishy?’.”

On Wednesday, Sunak said the formula for the new fund was “based on an index of economic need, which is transparently published by MHCLG [the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government], and based on a bunch of objective measures”.

Meanwhile, Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, questioned why the £20 Universal Credit (UC) uplift was stopping immediately, rather than being phased out.

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He said: “It is, by the way, remarkable that while the Chancellor felt the need for a gradual phase-out of furlough, business rates support, stamp duty reductions and VAT reductions, he is still set on a cliff-edge reduction in UC such that incomes of some of the poorest families will fall by over £80 between one month and the next.

“Whatever the case for cutting generosity into the longer term, if you’re going to do so the case for doing it gradually rather than all at once looks unanswerable.”

He added that the Budget made the Chancellor look less like “Santa Sunak” and “more like Scrooge Sunak”.

The IFS also warned that the spending plans to help address the UK’s coronavirus-battered public finances “do not look deliverable”.