Political ads on Facebook repeat familiar claims about tax rises, waiting lists and immigration
We’ve been taking a look at some of the adverts political parties have been running on Facebook—and have found a number making claims we’ve previously fact checked.
A Facebook advert for Alex Fawbert, the Labour candidate for Boston and Skegness, ran between 6 and 10 June and received between 2,000 and 3,000 impressions, according to Facebook’s ad library. In the video featured in the ad, Ms Fawbert said: “We know that there are eight million people currently on waiting lists.” We’ve heard similar claims to this throughout the campaign, from Labour and the Green party. But as we’ve written before, it’s not what NHS data shows.
Assuming Ms Fawbert was talking about NHS England (which is the part of the NHS the UK government controls) and referral to treatment (RTT) data, which is usually what people mean by “the waiting list”, then it appears she was referring not to the number of people on waiting lists but the number of cases, and it’s been rounded up to eight million.
In the latest NHS England data, collected at the end of April 2024, about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.6 million courses of treatment. (At the time the ad started, the latest data, for March 2024, said 6.3 million people and 7.5 million cases.) There are always more cases than people in the data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.
Meanwhile, an advert for Labour’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip candidate Danny Beales claimed that under the Conservatives “waiting lists will go up and up and hit 10 million”.
While it’s impossible to say for sure what’ll happen in future, as we wrote a couple of weeks ago, that prediction’s been challenged by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It says lists are likely to “at worst flatline”, whichever party forms the next government.
Meanwhile the Conservatives’ claim that under Labour working families face a £2,094 tax rise features in a number of the party’s Facebook adverts, often as a standalone figure.
As we wrote last week, the £2,094 figure is unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. It comes from a Conservative party estimate of Labour’s “unfunded spending commitments”, but many of the costings behind the calculation are uncertain. Even if the figure was right, we can’t be certain this money would be collected by raising taxes, and if it was, families are unlikely to be affected equally.
Finally, Jake Berry, the Conservative candidate for Rossendale and Darwen, made a familiar claim about immigration in a Facebook ad which the ad library says ran from 4 to 11 June and received between 7,000 and 8,000 impressions. The advert said: “Labour don’t want to control immigration. Their plans could see us take in 100,000 extra illegal migrants, from Europe, every single year.”
We’ve written about similar claims from Conservative politicians several times before. The 100,000 figure was circulated by the Conservative party last September in response to comments made by Sir Keir Starmer about a potential future returns agreement with the EU. But the way it was calculated is incorrect.
We don’t know how many more migrants might come to the UK as a result of any future returns deal negotiated under Labour. Labour has not detailed what such a deal would involve or said how many migrants it would be willing to accept.
We’ve contacted the Labour party and the Conservative party for comment, as well as all the candidates behind the adverts listed above, and will update this post if they respond.
Update: Labour candidate Danny Beales contacted Full Fact after this blog was published, noting that his use of the 10 million waiting list figure was based on Labour “analysis that was published in a national press release”. He added that “data this week has shown a further increase in waiting times”. The latest NHS England data, for April 2024, showed a slight increase in cases awaiting treatment, compared to the previous month.