Politics Live

In a speech in the Downing Street garden today, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said there’s a “£22 billion black hole in the public finances”. 

We’d already heard Labour party chair Ellie Reeves mention the same figure during interviews this morning.

Mr Starmer and Ms Reeves are referring to an announcement made by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, last month. At the time, she said an audit by the Treasury had discovered a £22 billion forecast overspend this year. 

We looked into this last month. 

Ahead of the election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had said that a new government would likely see a shortfall of £10-£20 billion by 2028/29. After the chancellor’s statement, IFS Director Paul Johnson said many of the challenges Labour outlined in July were “entirely predictable”, but that the in-year financial pressures did “genuinely appear to be greater than could be discerned from the outside”. 

Following the chancellor’s statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility said it had launched a review into the preparation of the Departmental Expenditure Limits forecast for the March 2024 Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the report they produced for the then Conservative government’s Spring Budget. The review would look at the “adequacy of the information” provided by the Treasury at the time. 

The Labour party chair and minister without portfolio, Ellie Reeves, said on Sky News this morning: “We’ve come into government. We’ve fixed the disputes with the junior doctors, so that people can get the appointments that they need.”

It’s true that the government has made an offer considered acceptable by the BMA, the union that represents the doctors. 

However, it’s probably going a bit far to say this means they’ve “fixed” the dispute, since the doctors themselves are still voting on whether to accept the offer. The referendum to decide this doesn’t close until 15 September.

We’ve asked Ms Reeves for comment and will update this blog with any response.

In January, we fact checked former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he made a similar claim, saying the previous government had “reached resolution” with other doctors, when at the time both consultants and specialty/specialist doctors had not yet confirmed that their strikes were over.

The Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens, claimed earlier today that the last Labour government saw the highest patient satisfaction and the shortest waiting lists in the NHS’s history. In fact we don’t have comparable data going back long enough, so we can’t be sure that either of these claims is true.

Speaking on Times Radio on 20 August, Ms Stevens said: “The last time that we had two Labour governments in the United Kingdom, one in Wales and one in Westminster, we had the highest patient satisfaction in NHS history and the shortest waiting list times as well.”

We’ve fact checked these claims a number of times before, such as when Keir Starmer said it last year, and then again during his election campaign.

As we said then, we’ve not been able to find a consistent measure of patient satisfaction over the history of the NHS. The Picker Institute, who conduct research on people’s experience of care, confirmed that they are also not aware of comparable data covering both the last Labour government and the Conservative-led government that followed.

Public satisfaction with the NHS began to be measured consistently in 1983, and reached its highest point in 2010, just after the end of the last Labour government. (Although it’s unlikely the Conservative-led coalition that followed had significantly influenced the NHS by then.)

Likewise, we can’t say whether Labour delivered the shortest NHS waiting lists because waiting lists have been measured in several different ways since the NHS was founded.

Experts at the Nuffield Trust told us that they were not aware of any data that would allow a direct comparison of waiting lists throughout the history of the NHS.

We’ve contacted Ms Stevens and will update this blog with any response.

This week saw A-level results released across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and politicians from both sides of the House have repeated claims that we’ve looked at before. 

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Labour’s education secretary Bridget Phillipson stated: “We’ve seen big rises under the last government where it comes to child poverty.”

As we’ve explained in previous fact checks, there are different ways of measuring child poverty. While some measures show an increase since 2010, at least one measure—the number of children in absolute low income after housing costs—fell during the period of Conservative-led or Conservative government, from 3.7 million in 2009/10 to 3.6 million in 2022/23. 

Meanwhile, Full Fact’s AI tools alerted us to another claim we’d looked into previously. Conservative shadow minister Greg Smith wrote in the Daily Express: “Since 2010, the percentage of state-funded schools in England rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted has surged from 68% to 90%.”

This is similar to a claim made earlier this year by then schools minister Damian Hinds. When we looked at that we found that, although it is accurate for England, the way schools are inspected has changed, making direct comparisons between these time periods difficult.

We’ve been asked to have a look at comments made by the Conservative MP and former minister David Davis MP on a recent episode of Leading, an interview strand of The Rest is Politics podcast, hosted by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. 

In the podcast, Mr Davis and Mr Stewart discussed trade barriers with China. Mr Davis said graphics chips in computers come from Taiwan, which was then followed by this exchange: 

RS: “Nobody’s putting tariff barriers against Taiwan, they’re putting tariff barriers against China”.

DD: “But that’s where it comes from… Most of our trade is with Taiwan, that’s the first thing to know about this”. 

It’s not entirely clear what comparison Mr Davis was making. We’ve contacted him and will update this blog if we receive a reply. 

But official statistics show that the total value of the UK’s trade with China is greater than its trade with Taiwan. 

In the four quarters to the end of Quarter 1 2024, the value of total trade between the UK and Taiwan was £7.2 billion. In the same period, the UK’s trade with China was worth £86.5 billion. Taiwan was the UK’s 35th largest trading partner, and China the 6th largest.

While the UK doesn’t recognise Taiwan as a state, since 1991 the UK and Taiwan have held annual ministerial trade talks. 

Update: We are grateful to Mr Davis for clarifying that he intended to refer solely to supply of very advanced technology, specifically logic chips (<10 nanometres), the majority of which are made in Taiwan, rather than to the UK’s overall trade, or its trade in tech products generally, with Taiwan and China. 

Following the news that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has chosen her running mate (Minnesota governor Tim Walz), we’ve seen coverage of the US election in some UK newspapers this morning. 

However, two of the papers covering the story have incorrectly stated the age of the Republican candidate and former President, Donald Trump, on their front pages. 

The Times said Mr Trump is 74, while the Telegraph said he’s 77. Mr Trump was born on 14 June 1946—meaning he’s now 78 years old. 

You may have noticed it’s been slightly quiet over here on our politics blog. 

Parliament rose for its summer recess on 30 July, just a few weeks after the general election. 

Before then, we covered Sir Keir Starmer’s first PMQs as Prime Minister, and looked at public spending in Scotland, as well as claims about the two-child benefit cap. 

However, we’re still busy checking facts. 

The big political story in the last week or so has been the disorder and rioting following the stabbings in Southport. We’ve written about the role misinformation has played in these events, as well as an explainer on the riots, and the response by government and the police. We will continue to monitor developments and fact check related claims as long as necessary. 

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve also covered online claims about the pensions former prime ministers receive, the Paris Olympics, as well as claims about the US—where the presidential race is heating up. 

Worry not—assuming it’s not recalled sooner, Parliament’s back on 2 September, though it’ll rise again 10 days later, on 12 September, for the party conferences. We’ll keep checking the facts in the meantime.

The Conservatives have claimed Labour “lied” about how much its energy plans would save people on their energy bills.

Labour said during the election that its plan to achieve ‘clean energy’ (meaning power generated through fossil-free energy sources) would save families “up to £300” on their bills per year by 2030.

But it was reported by the Daily Mail yesterday that Number 10 would no longer commit to this figure.

We looked at this figure before the election and found that at that point it was already out of date.

It’s based on a report by the energy think tank Ember, which estimated that under a scenario in which the UK met its renewable energy commitments, the average household electricity bill would be around £300 lower in 2030 than in 2023.

However, the £300 figure is based on the level of the energy price cap in July-September 2023. The price cap has since decreased (though is forecast to increase again later this year).

The £300 figure is also not a direct assessment of the impact of Labour’s plans, but an estimate of the impact of a different, less ambitious scenario than Labour is proposing.

Energy security and Net Zero minister Ed Miliband said the government had lifted a nine-year “ban” on onshore wind in England, during interviews on BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme [1:55:59] and Sky News this morning. This was similarly reported by the Times. 

As we’ve explained before, while policies introduced in 2015 were often described as a “de-facto ban”, due to a substantial decrease in applications for onshore wind sites, there was no formal ban on onshore wind farms as such. 

We’ve contacted Mr Miliband for comment and will update this blog if we receive a response.

Labour MP and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden seems to have confused the number of people on NHS waiting lists with the number of cases.

Giving a statement in the House of Commons on the Covid-19 Inquiry, Mr McFadden said: “As I stand here today with 8 million people on NHS waiting lists.”

This is a mistake we’ve seen a lot of and involves mixing up the number of cases on the main waiting list in England (7.6 million according to the latest data) with the number of individual people (around 6.4 million).

The number of cases will always be greater than the number of individual people because some people will be waiting for treatment for more than one thing.

We’ve fact checked similar claims a number of times over the last year—including when Mr McFadden used the 8 million figure in May.

In April 2024, the Office for National Statistics published waiting list survey data giving a greater insight into how many people are waiting across other types of waiting lists not covered by the main waiting list.

This indicated that in January and February 2024, around 21% of adults in England—or 9.7 million adults—were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”.

This claim was detected using Full Fact’s AI tools. You can find more about these on our website.