Sunday morning politics shows include familiar claims about waiting lists, tax and mortgages

On today’s morning politics shows we spotted some familiar claims we’ve previously fact checked. 

On Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips [7:04 and 16:57], Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting twice mentioned “the 7.5 million” on waiting lists. 

While Mr Streeting did not specify whether he meant people or cases on waiting lists, as we’ve written before, 7.5 million was the number of cases, not people, on NHS England waiting lists. 

The latest data, collected at the end of April 2024, shows about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.6 million courses of treatment.

And on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Mr Streeting referred to “the kind of unfunded gimmicks we have seen in this Conservative election campaign which could see people’s mortgages go up by £4,800”. 

As we explained a few days ago, this is a speculative figure, which seems to be an estimate of the average annual extra cost of a mortgage at the end of the next parliament. It is based on several uncertain assumptions, and some of the detail of Labour’s workings remains unclear.

For the Conservatives, transport secretary Mark Harper told Laura Kuenssberg that under Labour there would be a “retirement tax where you would have to pay tax on the basic state pension”. This is based on forecasts showing that under current government policy the new state pension is set to increase slightly above the personal allowance for the first time. 

Labour says it’ll maintain current government policy and not raise the personal allowance, while the Conservatives say they will introduce a new age-related personal allowance that grows each year so that it will “always be higher than the level of the new state pension”. We wrote about this earlier this month. 

Mr Harper also said on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips [33:07] that under Labour there would be a “black hole” of “£2,000 for every family in the next, over the parliament”. As we’ve explained before, this figure is unreliable and based on a number of questionable assumptions. 

The Office for Statistics Regulation has also issued a statement criticising the Conservatives’ use of this figure.