Politics Live

In the last couple of weeks we’ve looked into two claims published in a document outlining the Labour party’s five “national missions”, reportedly the party’s election “campaigning bible”.

On 26 January, we checked a claim that there have been “4,000 GPs cut” under the Conservative government. 

Labour hasn’t responded to our questions about this claim, but this figure is unreliable, because Labour appear to have reached it by comparing the current data with a different, non-comparable dataset from before 2015.

If you date the current period of Conservative government from 2015, when the party won a majority in the House of Commons, then the number of fully qualified GPs has fallen by nearly 2,000—although the total including those in training has risen by about 3,000.

There appears to be no reliable way to compare with the number of GPs doing NHS work earlier than that—for example, with 2010, when the whole period of Conservative-led government began—because NHS Digital changed the way it counts GP numbers in 2015.

Labour’s document also said there are “2.98 million people now using food banks, up from 60,000 in 2010”—a claim we’ve also seen made elsewhere.

The Trussell Trust—the largest food bank network in the UK—confirmed to Full Fact that these figures show the number of emergency food parcels it distributed in 2022/23 and 2010/11, not the number of individual people using food banks. That means they could double-count people who use a food bank more than once, and also fail to count people who use food banks which aren’t run by the Trussell Trust.

We’ve not been able to find a reliable estimate for the number of people using food banks currently. Data published by the government suggests that in the 2021/22 financial year approximately two million people lived in a household where a food bank has been used—however use has clearly increased substantially in recent years, with 760,000 people accessing Trussell Trust food banks for the first time in 2022/23.

Rishi Sunak’s admission that the government has failed on a pledge to cut NHS waiting lists in England is widely covered this morning—and a common error cropped up again in a chart in the Guardian’s write-up, which has since been corrected.

The chart’s headline said it showed that “more than 7.6m NHS patients in England were awaiting treatment in November”.

In fact, as you can see from a chart of our own in a recent fact check, about 6.4 million patients were estimated to be waiting for non-emergency treatment with NHS England at the end of November.

But between them, these people were awaiting treatment in about 7.6 million cases. There are more cases than patients on the waiting list, because some people are waiting to be treated for more than one thing. 

It’s been common to talk about patients instead of cases for a long time, but it was hard to say how misleading this was until NHS England began publishing an estimate for the number of patients last year.

Now that we have a correct number, we think it’s important that people in politics and the media should use it, so we’ve checked several claims like this recently.

After we contacted the Guardian about the error, the chart’s headline was corrected to say “more than 7.6m NHS cases in England were awaiting treatment in November”.

On Times Radio this morning, Labour’s shadow economic secretary to the Treasury, Tulip Siddiq, said “the government has actually increased taxes 25 times since the last election.” 

Later, at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer appeared to add to the list. He said Rishi Sunak had “told every council in the country to put their council tax up by the maximum of 5%”, adding “that’s 26 tax rises now”.

These are variations of a claim we’ve heard regularly from Labour in recent months. We wrote about it last week.  

Full Fact obtained what appears to be the list of the 25 tax rises, but we don’t know why Labour selected these specific measures for inclusion. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said there have likely been hundreds of revenue-raising tax changes (as well as cuts) taking effect since 2019.

With the government’s Safety of Rwanda Bill continuing its passage in the House of Lords today, Full Fact looked into a claim that other countries were seeking to copy the UK’s plan to process asylum claims in a third country. 

Earlier this month a headline in the HuffPost claimed that “a surprisingly large number of countries have copied [the] UK's Rwanda plan.”

This is not quite right. Although the countries mentioned in the article—Austria, Italy, Germany and Denmark—have explored the option of using a third country for processing asylum seekers with a view to determining their right to move to those countries, the UK’s proposed Rwanda scheme goes further than this, as it removes asylum seekers’ rights to seek asylum in the UK. 

The HuffPost article also mentions the Emergency Transit System which removes asylum seekers from Libya and transports them to Rwanda. This scheme is funded by the EU and is very different to the proposals being put forward by the UK.

Full Fact contacted the HuffPost and the headline of the article has since been amended to say that some other countries “could copy” the UK scheme. We are grateful to the HuffPost for making this change.

On Sky News this morning, Labour party chair and shadow women and equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds MP said: “We’ve already got 7.8 million people on the NHS waiting list”. 

However, as we’ve pointed out before, this isn’t what NHS data shows. The latest NHS England statistics show that in November 2023, there were an estimated 6.4 million unique patients—so individual people—on the waiting list. They were waiting for 7.61 million types of treatment to begin, with some people waiting for more than one course of treatment. 

We’ve previously written to the Labour party, as well as other politicians and media outlets, and asked them to stop repeating this claim. 

At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Sir Keir Starmer told the Commons that Rishi Sunak is “Mr 25 tax rises”. 

This is a claim we’ve heard repeatedly from Labour in recent weeks, often with the caveat that these 25 tax rises have occurred since the last general election. Several shadow ministers have said it, and we’ve also seen it on Labour’s social media channels. 

While Labour haven’t publicly published the list of 25 tax rises, Full Fact was sent the list by shadow Treasury minister Lord Livermore. We wrote about it yesterday. 

It includes a range of tax changes that have occurred since 2019, but some—such as the windfall tax, or the temporary rise in National Insurance that occurred in 2022—are missing. 

We’re not sure how Labour arrived at their figure, and their press office has not responded to our queries about how the list was compiled.

However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) told us that simply counting the number of rises “isn’t very interesting or meaningful”. The IFS also said that Labour’s analysis is likely to have missed a large number of specific tax rises, and that there have likely been hundreds of rises (and reductions) since 2019. 

A better measure for looking at tax rises, said the IFS, is looking at the total amount of tax raised, and this parliament “is the biggest tax-raising parliament in modern times”. 

At Prime Minister’s Questions today, we heard a familiar claim from Rishi Sunak. He said “since 2010 there are 1.7 million fewer people in poverty”.

Mr Sunak has used this figure at a number of previous PMQs. As we’ve explained, it’s correct based on one measure of poverty, but other measures give a different picture. 

The Prime Minister’s figure matches the number of people in absolute poverty after housing costs, which fell by 1.7 million between 2009/10 and 2021/22, according to government data. 

The number in relative poverty after housing costs, however, is up by 900,000 over the same period.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation report which was the subject of the question to the Prime Minister uses this measure.

We wrote more about the different ways of measuring poverty in this fact check about a different claim last year.

Over the last couple of days, both the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the chancellor Jeremy Hunt have said that the average worker will take home £450 more a year as a result of this month’s reduction in the rate of National Insurance—but their claims are missing important context. 

In an article for the website Conservative Home, published this morning, Mr Hunt wrote: “Conservatives cut taxes when we can… The Autumn Statement was the start: two percentage points off employee National Insurance, worth £450 a year to the average worker.” 

In a piece for yesterday’s Sun on Sunday, meanwhile, Mr Sunak said that the National Insurance change means “someone on the average wage will take home £450 more this year”. 

We wrote about this figure earlier this month, when Mr Sunak made a similar claim.

It is true that the reduction will mean someone on £35,000 a year, roughly the average full-time wage, pays £450 less in National Insurance than if the rate had remained the same. But this figure doesn’t factor in the impact of freezes to the personal allowance threshold of income tax and how much someone earns before they begin paying National Insurance contributions. 

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the average worker will gain about £130 more from the National Insurance cut than they lose from this April’s freeze in thresholds. The IFS also says that frozen thresholds, which are set to stay in place until 2027/28, mean that the average worker will pay around £440 a year more in direct tax by this point. 

In a clip that has been widely reported in the media and shared on social media, the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today gave a misleading summary of the industrial disputes in the NHS to a woman in Winchester, reportedly a former NHS worker.

Mr Sunak said: “The key thing is we have resolved all the industrial action in the NHS, apart from the junior doctors, who are still not saying yes. But everyone else has said yes.”

NHS nurses in Northern Ireland are among a wide range of public sector workers who have taken strike action this week, but even in relation to the NHS in England—which the UK government controls—this is misleading.

Junior doctors are the only part of the NHS workforce in England who have taken national industrial action this month, as far as we can tell. But this does not mean that all NHS workers apart from junior doctors have “said yes” to the government’s pay offers, or ruled out more strikes.

As we wrote last week, consultants and specialty/specialist doctors in particular have not yet confirmed that their strikes are over. And since that fact check was published, consultant members of the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association union have voted to reject the government’s offer. The union explained the decision in some detail in a letter to the health secretary on Monday, proposing that they continue negotiations. 

Meanwhile, the British Medical Association union is still balloting consultants and specialty/specialist doctors over whether to accept an offer from the government, and have said they will pause strikes until the result is known. This ballot closes on 23 January. 

Both unions have said they have mandates to continue strikes if the offer is rejected.

Nurses have also not formally agreed a pay offer with the government. Strikes by nurses ended last June after a ballot of Royal College of Nursing members did not achieve a mandate for more strike action. This means its members cannot strike again and the RCN has said they will not be balloted again about pay in 2022/23 or 2023/24.

Full Fact has approached Number 10 and the Conservatives for comment.

We’ve spotted more examples of a misleading claim about Labour’s immigration plans which we’ve written about many times before.

A post by Jonathan Gullis MP, promoted as a political advert on Facebook by the Stoke-on-Trent Conservative Party, claimed that Labour “want to extend our borders to the Mediterranean by joining an EU quota sharing scheme, which would open our doors to more than 100,000 illegal migrants to the UK”.

The ad, which Facebook’s ad library says ran between 12 and 17 January and received 5,000-6,000 impressions, includes a clip of Mr Gullis making a similar claim on GB News. He also made a similar claim on BBC Politics Live [11:55] on Wednesday.

The figure was also referenced by another Conservative MP, Robin Millar, during an interview on Wednesday on BBC Radio Wales [1:12:45].

As we’ve written on multiple occasions, including earlier this week, the oft-repeated claim is misleading. The 100,000 figure is based on inaccurate Conservative party analysis of a recent EU agreement which Labour has said it has no plans to join.

It is true that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has previously said Labour would seek a returns agreement with the EU, but as the party hasn’t offered further detail there’s no reliable way of knowing the number of migrants it might involve.

Even if the UK were to participate in the EU agreement, or one operating on a similar basis, the Conservative calculation misinterprets what the agreement established in June last year would involve. 

Oxford University’s Migration Observatory has also told us: “The claim that a returns deal with the EU would mean the UK accepting 100,000 asylum seekers from Europe is incorrect: there are no two ways about it.”

Misleading political advertising damages democracy, yet it persists unregulated and unaccountable. Last year Full Fact wrote to the leaders of UK political parties asking them to commit to ensuring their party's advertising ahead of the upcoming general election is honest and truthful, and to have the party's political advertising independently regulated in elections that follow. So far the Green Party, Alliance Party and Plaid Cymru have agreed to this.