Sir Keir Starmer's conference speech: fact checked

This afternoon Sir Keir Starmer delivered his first Labour party conference speech as Prime Minister—and we fact checked it live, with a team of seven fact checkers and our AI tools looking at the claims he made in real time.

We didn’t find lots to check, certainly compared with some of Mr Starmer’s appearances during the election campaign, but he covered a number of topics we’ve looked at before. 

To begin, Mr Starmer claimed that a “ban” on onshore wind had been “lifted”. We’ve seen this claim a number of times previously, including as recently as Sunday when the deputy PM Angela Rayner used similar language in her own conference speech. 

Planning rules introduced in 2015, which Labour has now reversed, were often described as a “de-facto ban” because they resulted in a substantial decrease in applications for onshore wind sites. But there was no formal ban as such on onshore wind farms, and a limited number of onshore wind turbines have been built in recent years.

Elsewhere in his speech, the Prime Minister referenced a “financial black hole” and “£22 billion of unfunded spending commitments” inherited from the previous government.

We first looked at claims about this figure back in July—it’s taken from a Public Spending Review published by the Treasury which found that “forecast overspend on departmental spending is expected to be £21.9 billion” above the totals set out in the previous government’s Spring Budget.

Our post from yesterday has a quick summary of what this means and what the response to the claims has been.

Mr Starmer went on to outline his party’s commitment to cutting NHS waiting lists. We’ve written extensively about this topic and our explainer looks at how many are waiting, how long for and more.

And the Prime Minister also spoke about Labour’s plans to get “control of migration”. Another of our explainers looks at how migration levels have changed in recent years, and what might happen going forward.

Finally, we’re still looking into Mr Starmer’s claim that there has been a “23% increase in returns of people who have no right to be here compared with last summer”. We’ve asked the Home Office about this stat and will share an update if we hear back.