Rishi Sunak has doubled down on his controversial comments about diverting funding from “deprived urban areas”, insisting it is “incredibly wrong” to suggest there is not poverty elsewhere.

According to The New Statesman magazine, the Tory leadership hopeful told party members in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, that he had started changing public funding formulas to ensure “areas like this are getting the funding they deserve”.

Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas, to make sure areas like this are getting the funding 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.”

Read more: Rishi Sunak brags about taking money away from 'deprived' areas for wealthy UK towns like

But, responding to the video on Tuesday, Mr Sunak told ITV News “it’s not about Tunbridge Wells”, and he had been speaking to people in a “broader rural area”.

“I think it is incredibly wrong to suggest that there isn’t poverty or inequality in rural areas – that’s absurd,” he added.

On whether he would be willing to repeat his comments, Mr Sunak said: “I am repeating it.”

Asked if the Treasury was putting too much money into deprived, urban areas like the site of his interview on Tuesday, near Newcastle, he said: “Yeah.”

He added: “There are pockets of poverty that exist everywhere. They’re not just in big urban cities. They’re in small towns. They’re in smaller cities. They are in rural areas. There’s poverty everywhere that we need to tackle and make sure gets the investment it needs.”

The former chancellor and current leadership candidate told party members in Kent he would “undo” funding for deprived urban areas to help wealthy areas “get the funding they deserve”.

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