What was claimed
Sir Keir Starmer called for more houses to be built for “asylum seekers and illegal immigrants” and said “migrants have to be the priority for the government”.
Our verdict
We’ve found no evidence Mr Starmer ever said this.
No evidence for quote attributed to Keir Starmer circulating on social media
23 January 2024
A Facebook post claims that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called for more houses to be built for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants and said that migrants should be the priority for the government.
It shares a screenshot from an older post on X (formerly Twitter), which reads: “Keir Starmer calls for ‘more houses to be built’ for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants - “These migrants have to be the priority for the government. They are the future of our economy” he said”.
The original X post includes a link to an interview Mr Starmer gave to the BBC in November 2022. But while the Labour leader did speak about asylum processing in the clip, at no point did he say the words attributed to him, or call for “more houses to be built” for asylum seekers.
Full Fact also found no evidence of Mr Starmer saying this elsewhere. We’ve contacted the Labour party for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.
False or misleading claims about politicians have the potential to affect people’s opinions of individuals, parties or how they choose to vote. We often see these types of claims spread widely online, and have written a number of fact checks about quotes falsely attributed to politicians.
Image courtesy of Alamy
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence Mr Starmer ever said this.