Politics Live

Junior doctors—now also called “resident doctors”—begin a five-day strike in England today. In the past we’ve seen these strikes provoke much discussion (and some confusion) about their pay.

For one thing, no junior doctors are currently paid £14 an hour. As we’ve said more than once, this figure was the basic pay (in 2022/23) for first-year doctors only (who make up about a tenth of all junior doctors). 

Most junior doctors earn substantially more than this because they are more senior, or because of extra earnings for things like unsocial hours. In any case, a pay rise last year means that even the basic pay of first-year doctors is now slightly higher, at £15.53 an hour. 

At the time of writing, we don’t yet know what the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration will recommend for 2024/25.  

The real value of junior doctors’ pay has certainly fallen since the late 2000s, but we have seen claims that doctors received an above inflation pay rise last year. This was debatable, at least where junior doctors were concerned, because it depended which measure of inflation you used.

We’ve also seen some recent arguments about how much it would cost the government to meet junior doctors’ pay demands. The health secretary Victoria Atkins and the BMA, a union that represents many junior doctors, have disagreed about this recently.

While we haven’t checked those recent claims specifically, the Department of Health and Social Care and the BMA have disagreed about this before. In our previous fact check on the subject, we explained that the real issue on that occasion was whether you accounted for the money that doctors pay back to the government in tax.  

You’ll find these and other fact checks about junior doctors on our dedicated junior doctors page.

In a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) the Conservative party claimed: “Labour have said they wouldn't put up your taxes. But it's now becoming clear that they have every intention to put them up 👇”.

The post features a video of consumer financial journalist and broadcaster Martin Lewis speaking on Good Morning Britain (GMB) earlier today.

In the clip Mr Lewis says: “I had a conversation with a senior member of the Labour party, a private conversation, as I do with both parties. And the exact phrase they used with me is, when I asked about a particular policy, they said: ‘we’re not putting it in our manifesto because I can’t commit we’ll do it, but it is my aim we will do it over the next parliament’.”

The Conservatives appear to be using Mr Lewis’s comment to suggest that Labour intends to increase taxes beyond what has been set out in the party’s manifesto.

But, as Mr Lewis himself has pointed out, this takes his comments out of context.

Replying to the Conservatives’ post directly, Mr Lewis said on X: “NO WHERE in this comment do I talk about taxes. And the policy that I discussed (i will keep private as it was private) was NOT about taxes, or tax rises, it was about something that would be a positive change. [sic]”

Mr Lewis’s comments on GMB followed an interview with Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, who, when asked whether she would rule out scrapping the 25% tax free allowance on pensions, said “we have set out all of our plans in the manifesto, there is nothing in our manifesto the requires us to make any other changes”.

Immediately after the comment clipped by the Conservatives Mr Lewis added: “what you heard there is ‘it’s not in our manifesto’, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t planned to be done.”

So while Mr Lewis did broadly question whether Labour, if elected, might look to introduce policies in the future that weren’t in the party’s manifesto, at no point does he specifically suggest Labour is planning to increase taxes in addition to what the party has already confirmed.

Mr Lewis did not offer any comment beyond what he said on social media. We’ve approached the Conservatives and the Labour party for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.

With just over a week until polling day, the major parties’ manifestos have all been published, and the team at Full Fact have been busy assessing them. While we have been fact checking each of the manifestos and looking at the extent to which they meet our manifesto standards, we have also been investigating whether any policy proposals align with our own calls for change. 

Our verdict is now in: there are positive signs in the manifestos, including a number of commitments to reform the parliamentary system and proposals to amend the Online Safety Act. A number of parties understand that urgent action is needed to tackle bad information and have proposed concrete changes that we think would be beneficial. 

However, there are some serious shortcomings. We are not confident that any of the major parties campaigning to become the next government have robust enough proposals to protect democracy, improve honesty and trust in politics, or tackle misinformation.

A short review of manifestos:

• Reforms to the parliamentary system, specifically to make the ministerial code statutory, feature in a number of the manifestos. With public trust in politics at a 40-year low, we would want to see parties prioritising legislative reform to fix this.
• Despite the Online Safety Act being mentioned in nearly all of the manifestos, none directly stated that tackling harmful misinformation would prompt them to legislate further.
• Only one of the seven manifestos we reviewed mentions media literacy. We are disappointed that this issue appears to be low on the parties’ radars. Good media literacy is needed to equip the public with skills to recognise bad information.

Read the full blog article and our verdict against each of our policy calls.

In an article for the Daily Express, economic secretary to the Treasury Bim Afolami claimed: “Since January we have cut the taxes of the average worker by £900”.

As we’ve said before, this figure is missing context because it doesn’t account for the effect of ongoing tax threshold freezes. Overall, the average worker will experience a much smaller tax cut this year. 

In January the main rate of employee National Insurance contributions (NICs) was reduced from 12% to 10%, before being further reduced to 8% in April.

The £900 figure refers to the amount an average full-time worker (earning around £35,000) will save in NICs this financial year as a result of this combined four percentage point reduction. But once the impact of other tax changes is factored in, overall tax savings are lower.

That’s because since 2021 the government has frozen income tax and NICs thresholds—so the taxable income of an average worker is higher than it would have been if these thresholds had risen in line with inflation (as was normal practice in the past).

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that once all changes to NICs and income tax are taken into account, the average earner will save £340 in 2024/25 compared to what they would have paid otherwise.