Interest rates were not at 11% under the last Conservative government

During Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) last week, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said, when discussing the record of the previous Conservative government: “What did the Conservatives leave? Interest rates were at 11%.”

And Seema Malhotra MP, the minister for migration and citizenship, made the same claim on Monday (24 March), in a now-deleted X post. Above a clip of Mr Starmer’s comments at PMQs, Ms Malhotra wrote: “Under the Tories: open borders, interest rates at 11%, a £22 billion black hole and 14 years of failings.”

But the claim that interest rates were at 11% under the last Conservative government isn’t correct, as others have also pointed out. The Bank of England’s Bank Rate (also known as the base rate), which influences the interest rates offered by other UK banks, has not been 11% since 1991. 

The base rate was 5.25% in July 2024 when the Conservatives left office, the highest it had been since the spring of 2008. 

The Bank of England says the base rate is “the single most important interest rate in the UK”. While average mortgage rates offered by lenders are normally a bit higher than the base rate, we’ve seen no evidence from data compiled by Moneyfactscompare that they reached anywhere close to 11% under the Conservatives. 

It’s possible that Mr Starmer meant to refer instead to the rate of inflation, which reached 11.1% in October 2022. We’ve contacted Downing Street about Mr Starmer’s claim and will update this article if we receive a response.

After Full Fact got in touch, Ms Malhotra deleted her X post and replaced it with a corrected version which refers to “inflation rates at 11%”, rather than interest rates.

Ministers should correct false or misleading claims made in Parliament as soon as possible in keeping with the Ministerial Code, which states that they should correct “any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”.