Dr Rebecca Tidy

By claiming that buy-to-let is an easy option, Sir Keir is once again showing that he’s dangerously out of touch with people like me from working class backgrounds.

I’ve spent the last few weekends repainting the walls and cleaning the carpets of our three-bedroom house on Cornwall’s Roseland Peninsula. The garden’s looking much better than usual this year, as I’ve actually tidied it and grown lots of brightly coloured geraniums and petunias. Despite all this effort, I’m actually moving out for the summer with my six-year-old daughter, Mabel.

Matt Hughes earns around £30,000 a year as an on-site IT manager for a charity. His wife, Ali, works full-time as an office administrator and makes a similar salary. The couple live near Norwich with their six-year-old son, Charlie, who has infantile spasms epilepsy. Charlie faces severe physical disabilities and development delays stemming from his health condition, with the family shelling out up to £1,000 a month for medication and doctors’ appointments.

Last night, I boiled the kettle and used the hot water to wash a full day’s worth of dishes. Once they were done, I emptied the bowl on the tomato plants growing in our small garden. It’s a trick I’ve relied on since energy bills increased fourfold last year when I switched the immersion heater off as I couldn’t afford to pay the bill. And though electricity prices have reduced, I haven’t turned it back on because this approach offers a much-needed saving.

I stared at the banking app on my iPhone screen in disbelief. It showed that my mortgage was moving from a fixed interest rate of 0.9 per cent to the standard variable of 8.1 per cent the following month. I totted up the figures and realised that my £525 monthly repayment would skyrocket to £1,142.