What was claimed
Rishi Sunak once said homeless veterans could “easily manage” winter thanks to the survival training they received in the armed forces.
Our verdict
We can find no evidence that Mr Sunak has ever spoken these words.
No evidence that Rishi Sunak said homeless veterans could ‘easily manage’ winter
31 October 2022
A post on Twitter which has also been shared on Facebook attributes unsympathetic comments about homeless military veterans to the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, without providing any evidence in support.
The posts feature an image of Mr Sunak at the government despatch box in the House of Commons along with a quote which reads: “A silver lining with so many of the so called 'homeless' being veterans is that they have been through survival training in the British armed forces, and can therefore easily manage through the winter."
The Twitter post has been shared hundreds of times, and those on Facebook have attracted many angry comments from members of the public, accusing Mr Sunak lacking empathy with those forced to sleep rough.
However, Full Fact can find no evidence that Mr Sunak ever used these words.
A search of Hansard, the official record of what is said in Parliament, does not return any results for the text that features in the post. Searching for the phrase “survival training” returns only five results since 2017, none of which involve Mr Sunak.
Searching Mr Sunak’s contributions for the words “homeless” and “veterans” also does not produce any comments like the ones attributed to him on social media.
Having searched the archives of the Guardian, Telegraph and Times, and the PA Media news agency, we can find no record of Mr Sunak saying these words outside Parliament either.
The same image appeared on a separate Twitter account in July and has been retweeted more than 1,000 times. The account holder has been repeatedly challenged to provide corroboration for the claim but has failed to do so.
A reverse image search shows the photograph which accompanies the post was taken on 22 October 2020 while Mr Sunak was Chancellor of the Exchequer. On that day he spoke in the House of Commons about bringing in measures to support the economy during the Covid-19 restrictions. He made no mention of veterans or homelessness.
We contacted the Royal British Legion and the charity Help 4 Homeless Veterans. Neither said they were aware of Mr Sunak ever having spoken these words.
We have written to the office of Mr Sunak to ask for his comments but have not received a reply.
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 we can find no evidence that Mr Sunak ever said these words.