Is it an annual figure, or a total covering several years?

We’ve noticed several headline figures used by the Conservatives during the general election campaign that sound like they may refer to an annual amount, but which actually represent a number of years added together. 

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has criticised this practice in the past, when it is not made clear, and it’s something everyone should look out for.

One high-profile example is the Conservatives’ claim that a Labour government would raise taxes by £2,000 for working families. As we’ve explained in our full fact check on the figure—which for various reasons we found to be unreliable—it has been calculated to represent the additional tax families would supposedly pay over the next four years under Labour, not in a single year, as someone might reasonably assume. 

A statement by the OSR noted how “someone hearing the claim would have no way of knowing that this is an estimate summed together over four years.”

Similarly, the Conservatives’ claim that Labour’s pension plans would result in a “£1,000 retirement tax” is based on the Conservatives’ analysis of the cumulative amount that the average pensioner would pay between 2025/26 and 2029/30 under the party’s “triple lock plus” policy. But we’ve seen this figure reported in ways that don’t make it clear that it would be spread over multiple years.  

Again, we’ve unpacked the numbers behind this specific claim in our fact check, and you can read more about the impact of the “triple lock plus” in our explainer. 

Another example is the Conservatives’ plan to increase defence spending by an “additional £75 billion” by 2030. While this is the sum of all additional spending over the next six years, it has sometimes been presented as a standalone figure, without making this clear.

A 2022 House of Commons Library briefing, which has since been archived, said this is “not how increases and decreases in spending are usually discussed”. 

There are other problems with the figure that we’ve also explained before. 

The OSR’s statement said that it had “warned against this practice” before and called for all political leaders to use statistics with “intelligent transparency”. 

It said: “When distilling claims into a single number, the context should be sufficient to allow the average person to understand what it means and how significant it is.”

Full Fact has written fact checks about this practice before in 2022 and 2018. 

So when you hear big numbers quoted during the election campaign, it’s worth checking whether they are annual or cumulative. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more examples, from the Conservatives or anyone else. 

We’ve contacted the Conservative party for comment and will update our Election Live blog if we receive a response.

Update: We’ve updated this blog post to reflect the year in which the Conservative party’s proposed “triple lock plus” policy would take effect.