Politics Live

On Saturday, Parliament passed an emergency law giving the government powers to intervene in the British Steel plant at Scunthorpe, which was reportedly in danger of being closed by its Chinese owners, Jingye.  

Despite this, the plant reportedly remains in a “race against time” to obtain the raw materials needed to maintain operations at its two operational blast furnaces. 

But what does this actually mean?

A blast furnace is a large steel cylinder lined with refractory bricks. These can be thought of as extremely high-performance versions of the bricks used to line kilns or pizza ovens, capable of operating at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees celsius. 

Raw materials, including iron ore, coke (a specific kind of coal) and limestone, are added to the top of the furnace, while air heated to around 1,000 degrees celsius is blasted into the bottom of the furnace. As the materials heat, the temperature rises to above 2,000 degrees, creating pure liquid iron which sinks to the bottom of the furnace where it can be collected. 

Blast furnaces are designed to operate continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for a number of years, which means a steady supply of raw materials must always be on hand. 

With the plant reportedly losing £700,000 per day, there have been concerns about maintaining the flow of supplies required to keep the furnaces running. This was confirmed when Parliament was recalled on Saturday 12 April, with business secretary Jonathan Reynolds saying: “it has become clear that the intention of Jingye was to refuse to purchase sufficient raw materials to keep the blast furnaces running. In fact, its intention was to cancel and refuse to pay for existing orders.”

If the flow of materials is interrupted, the temperature inside the furnaces will begin to fall. If this happens the lining of the furnaces could be damaged, making it unsafe to return them to a higher temperature. If the furnaces continue to cool further, there is a risk any metal inside can turn into a solid lump, potentially rendering the entire structures useless. 

It’s not immediately clear how much the government’s decision to step in will cost—it has said that funding for the site will come from the government’s £2.5 billion steel fund.

However, experts have said that ordering the raw materials required to keep the furnaces running will be less costly than if the furnaces were to require restarting. 

Speaking on Sky News this morning, the health secretary Wes Streeting overstated the number of people on the NHS waiting list. He said: “There is still more than seven million people on [the] NHS waiting list.”

This is not quite right according to the latest NHS England figures. They show that in January 2025 there were actually about 6.3 million people on the NHS England waiting list for elective care, and about 7.4 million cases. 

As we’ve written many times before, including about a claim Mr Streeting made in February which also overstated the number of people on the waiting list, there are always more cases than people on the list as some people are waiting for treatment for more than one thing.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) recently acknowledged the distinction during discussions with Full Fact. It explained that it was concerned by the risk of confusion if the number of patients and the number of cases were used in different contexts, but told us that it would recommend saying “cases where a patient is waiting” in future.

We’ve contacted Mr Streeting’s office and the DHSC about his claim today and will update this blog if we hear back. 

You can read more about NHS waiting lists in our explainer.

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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has corrected an error on its death statistics dashboard, after Full Fact got in touch.

The error concerned deaths from pneumonia or flu, which we have written about before.

Originally, the dashboard contained a line chart and an associated file of data, which claimed to show the number of people dying from “influenza and pneumonia”.

But strictly speaking, the chart showed the number of deaths from influenza or pneumonia, because not every death involved, or was due to, both conditions. 

This confusion can happen easily, because “influenza and pneumonia” is the name of a category in the International Classification of Diseases, which is widely used to code different causes of death. It has caused problems in the past, when the media reported this data in the mistaken belief that everyone in this category died from flu.

Helpfully, the ONS let us know on 3 April that it had fixed the page, which now refers to deaths caused by “influenza or pneumonia” instead. It fixed a similar problem a couple of years ago. 

We’re grateful to Labour MP Dr Allison Gardner, who corrected a Facebook post that mixed up the number of people and the number of cases on the NHS England waiting list.

Dr Gardner is the fifth MP in the current Parliament to correct a waiting list error after we contacted them. However, others have yet to correct similar errors, even though we have asked them to do so.

Our AI tools found a post by Dr Gardner on Saturday, which originally said there had been a record high of “nearly 8 million people” waiting for treatment under the Conservatives. In fact, as you can see in our waiting lists explainer, the backlog peaked at 6.5 million people—who were involved in about 7.8 million cases.

NHS England began to publish an estimate for the number of people on the waiting list in November 2023. Since then, we have taken action many times to address confusion between estimates for the number of people and the number of cases on the waiting list. The figures differ as some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.This latest correction came soon after we launched the #FactsMatter campaign. Find out more about how you can support us in our fight for a better information environment.  

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The Labour MP Mike Reader has corrected a Facebook post that mixed up the number of people and the number of cases on the NHS England waiting list.

Our AI tools found a post by Mr Reader on Saturday, which originally said: “When the government took office last July, there was a staggering backlog of over 7.6 million people waiting for essential treatment.” 

In fact, as you can see in our waiting lists explainer, the backlog at the end of July 2024 was about 7.6 million cases, involving about 6.4 million people—some of whom were waiting for treatment for more than one thing. (These were the same as the figures for the end of June 2024, just before the election.) Mr Reader corrected this yesterday afternoon.

This is a very common source of confusion that we have written about many times since NHS England began to publish an estimate for the number of people on the waiting list in November 2023.