Budget 2025: fact checked

It’s almost time for the second Budget of this Labour government. On Wednesday 26 November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves will take to the despatch box in the House of Commons after Prime Minister’s Questions, at around 12:30pm.

The proceedings will be broadcast live and in full on Parliament’s own website, as well as on BBC Parliament. We expect other news channels, such as BBC News and Sky News, to cover the Budget live as well.

Over at Full Fact, we’ll be following the Budget live. We’ll be checking claims made by the chancellor and other MPs during the subsequent debate, and will highlight any statements we think are wrong, misleading or need more context.

We’re aiming to post our findings over on X and Bluesky as quickly as we’re able to, but some claims may need more time to fully investigate.

This year we’ve partnered with the Independent too, so keep an eye on their website for our coverage as well.

What have we already looked at?

We’ve already looked at a couple of things people have been discussing in advance of the Budget in recent weeks—what promises the Labour party has made on income tax, and how big the fiscal ‘black hole’ in the public finances may be.

Our Government Tracker is also monitoring progress on a wide range of other Labour promises that may be impacted by the Budget, such as the government’s ambition to achieve the highest sustained growth in the G7, increased defence spending, the building of 1.5 million new homes, keeping the rate of corporation tax at 25%, the delivery of higher living standards, as well as several pledges on taxes that could be impacted by Ms Reeves’s announcements.

A reminder - what is the Budget?

The Budget is where the Chancellor of the Exchequer presents a statement on the UK’s finances and economic forecasts to Parliament, announces any changes in taxation and outlines departmental spending.

While the government only delivers one Budget a year, in 2025 we’ve already seen Labour’s first Spending Review—where the government sets out the budgets for individual departments for the coming years—and the Spring Statement, in which Ms Reeves gave Parliament an update on the state of the economy.

Alongside the Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will produce a forecast that will outline its predictions for how much economic growth and productivity the UK can expect to see in the coming years.

The Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch MP, is expected to respond to the Budget after Ms Reeves has finished her speech.

How do we ‘live fact check’?

Once the Budget begins, our fact checkers will be monitoring claims in real time, with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools. We’re a small team, so it’s not possible for us to check every single claim, but if we can publish a quick verdict on what we’ve heard we will.

Some claims can be more complicated to check than they first appear, or require further research. If claims do require further investigation, we’ll dig into them in more detail after the Budget statement has ended.

When Parliament is sitting we ‘live fact check’ Prime Minister’s Questions each week, and we’ve got a lot of experience checking other big political events as they happen. We checked Ms Reeves’s first Budget as chancellor in October 2024, and during the general election of that year we fact checked a number of leaders’ debates live, as well as some of the head-to-head events with Sir Keir Starmer and then-leader of the Conservatives Rishi Sunak.

We also live fact checked TV debates during previous general elections, and in the 2022 Conservative leadership contest.

We published a blog post earlier this year covering in more detail how we go about live fact checking.